How did a handful of old bones reignite the long-standing face-off between creationists and evolutionists?

It started in 1991 when noted paleontologist, Jack Horner, sent some fossil fragments of a 68-million-year-old dinosaur to Mary Schweitzer. Schweitzer gave a piece to a lab assistant to be cleaned. The specimen was immersed in a mild acid and forgotten.

Weeks later the forgotten fragment came to mind, but it was too late. By this time all the minerals would be dissolved; there would be nothing left. But there was. Curious, the assistant examined the remaining white matter and found it to be stretchy. Impossible, she thought.

She told Schweitzer. “Impossible,” she said. “Here's another piece. Do it again.” And again she found only that puzzling white matter as elastic as a rubber band.

When Schweitzer informed Horner, he too was incredulous. He advised her to try to refute her findings. And so she tried to do.

Finally, in 1997, Schweitzer published her discovery and her futile attempts to disprove that the impossible was possible---seemingly fresh tissue in a dinosaur fossil tens of millions of years old.

Others repeated Schweitzer's work and found what she found: translucent tiny tubes that looked exactly like vascular capillaries. Inside the capillaries were round red structures that looked like, you guessed it, red blood cells. And other cells, too, osteocytes, medullary tissue, and the exceedingly fragile molecule, DNA, all embedded in malleable, once-living collagen---that stretchy white stuff.

Next, the soft tissue was examined to determine its age. The gold standard for dating ancient organic material is C14.

C14 is a radioactive isotope that decreases with time. Living organisms constantly ingest and replace this isotope. When the organism dies, C14 is no longer ingested. The remaining C14 indicates the age of the specimen; the less C14, the older the specimen. After 100,000 years no measurable C14 is left and the specimen cannot be dated.

The results: tissues from many different specimens always dated between 20,000 to 40,000 years old.

Something was anachronistically amiss. Either the microscopic discoveries and the C14 tests were all wrong, or the age of the dino fossils had too many zeros.

The year is 2012. Dr. Mark Armitage takes center stage in the dino controversy.

Armitage made the discovery of a lifetime, a large Triceratops horn. He examined the horn under an electron microscope and saw layers of soft tissue composed of delicate cells. He published his discovery privately adding his opinion that it proved a divine creation not a godless evolution. That lit the fuse.

Shortly thereafter his supervisor stormed into his lab pointing his finger at Armitage, “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department.” He was fired.

But why? He had been on the staff of California State University for three years, published some 30 papers in peer reviewed profession journals, and received several awards and letters of commendation.

Could it be that Christians are not capable of doing science? Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, and Galileo, come to mind. And the incomparable, Isaac Newton, whose life-long passion was the Bible, was also a Christian.

What Armitage did was attack someone's religion, the religion of evolution. By definition evolution, like Christianity, is a religion.

Science operates within narrow confines what is being studied must be quantifiable and subject to experimentation that can be replicated by others. Evolution and Christianity are based on faith not on science.

That explains why Armitage was ousted in a fit of rage; it was a religious---not scientific---confrontation. But what are we to make of the contradictory presence of apparently young tissue in ancient fossils?

Occam's razor is a line of reasoning that says the simplest answer is often correct.

Applying Occam's razor to the tissue/fossil problem, the simplest answer is that the entire evolutionary dating system based on eons of time is wrong. Young tissue is found in fossils because the fossils are young.

In the eighteen years since Schweitzer published her discovery, the only other explanation for age-defying tissue is Schweitzer's brew of iron and ostrich blood that preserved tissue for two years.

But for those who think that two years is a mite shy of 68 million years, we'll go with scraping the entire Darwinian timeline. And while we're at it, Darwin, too.

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA