What comes to mind when you hear the word “fossil?” Perhaps a mental image of a bone from a dinosaur millions of years old turned into stone. That’s what most people picture. Trouble is, it’s completely wrong.

Dinosaur bones don’t turn into stone. Minerals in the soil slowly replace bone tissue until all the bone has been replaced by minerals—-or so it was thought. Now partiality fossilized bones with intact, soft dinosaur tissue are popping up like daffodils in the spring. This recent discovery is of revelatory importance as we shall see.

The other error, and most astounding, is that dino fossils may not be millions but thousands of years old.

The story of young fossils begins in 1991. Dr. Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University, was examining bone fragments from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Schweitzer was having difficulty getting the ultra thin sections of a bone to adhere to a glass slide.

She enlisted the help of a colleague who succeeded in preparing the slide and took it to a conference of veterinarians. She thought it would make an interesting exhibit. Interesting? It proved to be mind-boggling.

One of the vets looked at the slide through a microscope and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?”

When the slide was returned to Schweitzer and told it might show actual cells of the 68 million-year-old T. rex, she was incredulous. Nevertheless, she started an investigation that would last for months. Conclusion: The vet was right; those red spots were red blood cells.

Then Schweitzer discovered collagen, soft and as elastic as a rubber band, flexible blood vessels, traces of DNA, proteins, and medullary cells used to encapsulate an ova in calcium. “It’s a girl [T. rex] and she’s pregnant,” exclaimed Schweitzer.

Her work has been repeatedly replicated, authenticated, and written about in peer-reviewed journals. Schweitzer’s findings and their verification were as welcomed as a check engine light. Her discoveries cast a shadow of suspicion on the age of fossils and on evolution itself.

It’s been said that paleontology is the second oldest profession. Why, then, hadn’t all this been discovered long ago? Simple. Everyone thought that searching for soft tissue in fossils that were millions of years old was like looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So no one looked. Now they are looking.

The hunt was on for other fossils that contained fragments of soft tissue. This tissue could be carbon-14 tested to determine its age and—-here’s where the donnybrook started—-the age of the dinosaur.

Thus far more than 30 specimens with soft tissue have been found all over the planet. Eight of these from four states in the U.S. have been C-14 tested. Their ages range between 22,000 years to 39,000 years far from the anticipated tens of millions of years.

While the controversy over the C-14 results rages, a firestorm among evolutionists about the fundamental driving force of evolution blazes. One camp insists it is natural selection while the rival faction contends it is mutation. Each side can muster impressive evidence showing that the other side is wrong.

The selectionists insist that it can’t be mutations. Mutations always result from damaged DNA. By their very nature mutations are a destructive process. They never lead to greater genetic complexity. Scientists have induced mutations in fruit flies, microscopic worms, and bacteria. They have always produced an inferior variant of the original DNA in every mutated plant or animal.

The mutationists counter saying it can’t be natural selection. Natural selection is not a creative force; it only selects from characteristics already in the gene pool. For example, animal breeders have known for centuries that horses can be bred for speed, sheep for wool, and cattle for meat because these qualities were already in the organisms’ genetic makeup.

This prompts the question: What if both sides are correct? If so, then both sides are wrong and evolution has no driving force. Its legs have been cut out from under it.

Adding to the dispute are the C-14 tests yielding dates of dino fossils in thousands of years as opposed to the eonian stretches of time necessary according to evolutionary theory.

Darwin’s theory is under fire. Not from creationists, or Bible defenders, or religious zealots, or anti-evolutionists, but from science and the evolutionists themselves. It is a house divided.

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA