Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.
In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?
The popular science article explains:
Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.
Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.
The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.
They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.
Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.
We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.
This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.