Dating Fossils

[Red Baron Farms]

I provided one. Chordates are known to make burrows--chrotovinia and the like. Arthropods of various sorts also take chordate bones (including human bones, in one rather spectacular case I've seen) into their burrows. Add groundwater and you can mobilize any number of chemicals, including organic mollecules. These will get deposited in various places, depending on the local biogeochemistry.

You are still assuming that the bio mollecules and the bactieral film are causally connected. I'm arguing that they're not--two SEPARATE processes are involved. Both are widely known and widely documented, and both happening at the same time is far more likely than preserving soft tissue for 68 ma. Add a healthy dose of folks being primed to see these structures, and it's relatively easy to get what appears to be ancient soft tissue and biochemicals when in fact what you're seeing is contamination.

Yeah, I still don't see it, and I don't know what a chrotovinia is. (Krotovina?) Since you don't seem willing to explain it. All good. I'll just drop it and agree it could somehow be contaminated by some unknown to me mystical process. I will say it is not a very satisfying answer though.

 

[Dinwar]

Yeah, I still don't see it, and I don't know what a chrotovinia is. Since you don't seem willing to explain it.

Could partially be my problem--the spelling is actually krotovina (it's one of those words I've heard said ten thousand times, but seen written twice). Still, if you don't know what one of these is you do not have the knowledge to evaluate claims about where organic material came from, pure and simple. They are HEAVILY involved in groundwater flow and the like in the environments these bones were found in.

Krotovina are relatively large burrows. Many are made by burrowing mammals, spiders, and the like.

I'll just drop it and agree it could somehow be contaminated by some unknown to me mystical process.

If you think groundwater flow is mystical, you've got no concept of the issues involved in this. This is no different from Creatoinists refusing to accept evolution because transitional fossils don't exist, while refusing to actually look at the fossils in museums. We're talking basic geology here.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Could partially be my problem--the spelling is actually krotovina (it's one of those words I've heard said ten thousand times, but seen written twice). Still, if you don't know what one of these is you do not have the knowledge to evaluate claims about where organic material came from, pure and simple. They are HEAVILY involved in groundwater flow and the like in the environments these bones were found in.

Krotovina are relatively large burrows. Many are made by burrowing mammals, spiders, and the like.

If you think groundwater flow is mystical, you've got no concept of the issues involved in this. This is no different from Creatoinists refusing to accept evolution because transitional fossils don't exist, while refusing to actually look at the fossils in museums. We're talking basic geology here.

Yeah I just edited my post to ask if maybe you were talking about Krotovina. I understand how those work. However that is on a scale completely different than found here. Not many burrowing animals I know of dig up entire millions of years old fossilised T-Rex femurs and drag them down their burrows. Nor do I see how any small arthropods burrowing into solid fossilised millions of years old T-Rex bones and shaping their burrows exactly into the definitive structure of bone tissue so precise that they even can tell the sex of the dinosaur. Seems rather far fetched grasping at straws in order to dismiss any new possibilities. Now ground water. That's different. It can and does get into very tiny spaces. But would ground water be able to first dissolve the mineral and then replace that mineral with modern hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine then remineralise it? Even with help from bacteria? Remember the detail is down to the cellular level and even smaller.

 

[Dinwar]

Not many burrowing animals I know of dig up entire millions of years old fossilised T-Rex femurs and drag them down their burrows.

No--but many do drag other organic material, including bones, into their burrows, and many die in their burrows (there are so many fantastic fossils showing this that one wonders why they burrow at all). THAT is where I'm saying the organic material can come from. They don't drag the fossils up--they drag modern (ish; this process likely started a long time ago) material down to a point where water can leach out material and deposit it into the dinosaur bones.

Also, don't under-estimate the size of these arthropods. We're talking spiders the size of plates here--not exactly itty bitty little ants. They do NOT like having their burrows cut in half by excavators, either. That guy was rather upset with me that day.

But would ground water be able to first dissolve the mineral and then replace that mineral with modern hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine then remineralise it?

Doesn't have to. It just has to deposit it. Remember, I'm not convinced that these folks ONLY saw the appropriate structures for the features they were examining--I find it much more likely that other structures were there, but were ignored or simply not seen because the researchers weren't primed to see them. It's such a common issue in paleontology that we're actually trained to use it to our advantage--but it's a very dangerous tool, one that can easily take control if you're not very, very, VERY thorough in your methodology.

 

[Aepervius]

But ¹⁴C dating cannot give a meaningful age to something >65 million years old. Why even attempt it?

Old french proverb : It is easier to kill a dog if you pretend he has the rabbies.

In other word, the goal might simply have been to pretend the whole dating is bunk, by using an inappropriate method and then extending to the whole domain.

 

[John Jones]

Old french proverb : It is easier to kill a dog if you pretend he has the rabbies.

In other word, the goal might simply have been to pretend the whole dating is bunk, by using an inappropriate method and then extending to the whole domain.

I suspected that, but I didn't wanna make that call until I checked around.

 

[Delvo]

Dating fossils? I sense a joke here...

Well, someone I know has referred to white people dating or having sex with black people as "coal burners"...

it’s a double-stupid or some sort of dishonest move.

I always figure the explanation of Creationist claims of silly carbon dates for really old things are simply lies. A real lab with the equipment & trained staff to do this stuff wouldn't bother with something some schmo off the street brought to them with no record of how it had been handled up to that point and no academic justification, and even if they did, that lack of associated information would compel them to give an answer not in years but in pure isotope ratios alone because they'd know that you can't get from the isotope to the years without paying careful attention to the surrounding details. So there's no way a Creationist ever managed to grab whatever object they had in mind, take a little trip to the nearest Spectrometers-Я-Us, and have them toss it in a box with some flashing lights and tell them how old it was.

Bone, horn, skin, feathers, blood vessels, blood cells, internal cellular organelles, partially digested muscle tissue in coprolite, squid ink. They are all fundamentally different. But they are all organic remnants claimed to be preserved orders of magnitude longer than the traditional consensus asserts as possible.

I haven't heard of all of these types of soft tissue actually being preserved. Where have you?

What I've heard are reports about learning about some soft tissues indirectly, which could be mistaken for that. For example, feather colors are based on the shapes of a type of microscopic structure, and it's those shapes that got preserved as imprints in mud, not actual feathers in living color. Reptile skin, similarly, is known from imprints in mud because the scales are slower than most other organic stuff to decompose, but still did eventually. Horns' and claws' sizes and shapes can be inferred from the bone structure supporting them, and might also sometimes leave mud imprints. Mud imprints are also the main way we know anything about extinct plants and soft-bodied animals. And the stuff inside the dinosaur bones was composed of carbon compounds but had degraded to a point that calling it "tissue" anymore isn't really right, and even the carbon compounds had only been "preserved" because they were sealed inside the bones where atoms couldn't get in or out.

 

[Dinwar]

I always figure the explanation of Creationist claims of silly carbon dates for really old things are simply lies. A real lab with the equipment & trained staff to do this stuff wouldn't bother with something some schmo off the street brought to them with no record of how it had been handled up to that point and no academic justification, and even if they did, that lack of associated information would compel them to give an answer not in years but in pure isotope ratios alone because they'd know that you can't get from the isotope to the years without paying careful attention to the surrounding details.

The part the Creationists always leave out of the Mt. St. Helens tests they ran is that the labs sent back a reply basically saying "If you're willing to pay us we'll run the samples, but these results are going to be worthless because you're violating basically every principle involved in radiometric dating." I've little doubt someone, somewhere ran the specimens--radiometric dating is a business, and if you pay enough SOMEONE will run it for you. But odds are that the labs made it VERY clear in their results transmittals that these were basically fantasy numbers, every bit as meaningful as rolling a D20.

Reptile skin, similarly, is known from imprints in mud because the scales are slower than most other organic stuff to decompose, but still did eventually.

There is also mummified material, that got preserved as a fossil (not organic material), but which retains soft material.

People would be astonished to realize just how much soft stuff gets preserved. The Burgess Shale fauna were so well preserved that researchers were able to perform disections of these organisms. It was all carbon films (think very, very thin layers of coal), but still retained the shape of the body and organs. There are various ways to do it, but none that will retain identifiable tissue (meaning chemically identifiable--you can make inferrences from the shape), not the way some folks have recently started to suggest.

That's why I say that without an understanding of the local taphonomy, you really can't say much--all of this is HIGHLY dependent upon local conditions. We can say a few general things, and speculate about possible sequences of events, but local knowledge is critical here. Paleontologists are just people--we fall for fads just like everyone else. Someone thinks they found dinosaur tissue, so now everyone's going to try to be the next person to find it. I shudder to think about the damage they'll do.....We do not have a fantastic track record in that regard in my science, sadly. The first dinosaur egg sites were picked over so rapidly and poorly that we lost essentially all of the stratigraphic data, meaning it took decades to finally be able to say anything about the ecology and life histories of the organisms.

 

[Correa Neto]

Well, someone I know has referred to white people dating or having sex with black people as "coal burners"...

Uhm... Oven, logs... Got it... No-smut rule... Careful...

I always figure the explanation of Creationist claims of silly carbon dates for really old things are simply lies. A real lab with the equipment & trained staff to do this stuff wouldn't bother with something some schmo off the street brought to them with no record of how it had been handled up to that point and no academic justification, and even if they did, that lack of associated information would compel them to give an answer not in years but in pure isotope ratios alone because they'd know that you can't get from the isotope to the years without paying careful attention to the surrounding details. So there's no way a Creationist ever managed to grab whatever object they had in mind, take a little trip to the nearest Spectrometers-Я-Us, and have them toss it in a box with some flashing lights and tell them how old it was.

Cosi cosi.
Nowadays there are lots of dating geochron labs where you can have your sample assayed for a price. Pay-per-date. Send material and $$$ and you'll get your date.

The fact creationists don't send more material to the labs is quite likely evidence they know they won't like the results.

On crotovinas- Note the material being dug is close to the surface; its within the weathering zone. This means it may not be as rock-hard as you think. Regolith, soil...

A slightly off-topic tale. Back in the late 90's I was working with gold exploration at an area with several exploration galleries dating back from the XVIII to the 80's. Little if any documentary material. I entered at every single hole that range had. One of them I found weird. It was dug on weathered phillites and slates, not too far from the mineralized level possible location, but its inclination and direction meant it would never reach it. It was also rather low in height, what meant I had to crawl or wall on 4x4 mode. So far so good, sometimes those exploration galleries are narrow. I also noticed an area had a most strange shape; it looked like an oven for coal, like a dome. I seen some similar features at quartzite caves, but never at exploration galleries. At the gallery wall's there were some weird grooves, which looked like paralell tool marks for me; the local guy who was with me became uneasy; he thought they were the claw marks of a jaguar. Weird... Well, map made, let's go to the next one.

Fast-forward to 2013. While reading a report on the geology and paleontology of the area, made in advance to establishment of a conservation area, I found out the guys who made the report described several crotovines located quite higher on the range; not your average burrow, but rather large ones made by our Pleistocene almost VW Beetle-sized giant armadillos. Went to talk with one of the vertebrate paleontologists of the department. By sheer chance she had worked with similar stuff elsewhere in Brazil. Guess what? Yes, my "exploration gallery" was a crotovine, a giant armadillo burrow. The weird dome-shaped area? The giant armadilloes used them to turn inside the burrow, so they would not have to get out of the burrow tail-first. Oh, and those marks on the wall? They were actually claw marks... But not from jaguars...

And I got one more nice tale to brag & tell... Going back tho that range in February to map with lots of minions undergraduate students. Finding itagain and mapping is within the plans. They just don't know it yet.

 

[Dinwar]

On crotovinas- Note the material being dug is close to the surface; its within the weathering zone. This means it may not be as rock-hard as you think. Regolith, soil...

Oh dear gods in Hell yes! I remember putting a jacket on some ivory (likely Gomphothere, based on some teeth we found later, but not enough of the tusk to identify it). It was windy. Bad combination. Nothing breaks your heart like watching pieces of the fossil you're trying to protect blow away in the wind...I think the three of us (it was the end of the day, and we were bored) all nearly started crying at that point. We did get the fossil, though, as intact as anyone reasonably could!

That was something that was 10 feet bgs, exposed for maybe five hours. Imagine what a few years can do....On another site I remember seeing a patch of ground about ten feet in radius with enamel all over. It was a tooth (never did find out of what) that was exposed at the surface and just...disintigrated. I've also seen bone fossils exfoliate due to exposure, and other weird stuff no one ever tells you about in the glossy coffee-table books. Most of the vert fossil record is very, very badly worn bone made even worse by surface and near-surface exposure.

By sheer chance she had worked with similar stuff elsewhere in Brazil. Guess what? Yes, my "exploration gallery" was a crotovine, a giant armadillo burrow. The weird dome-shaped area? The giant armadilloes used them to turn inside the burrow, so they would not have to get out of the burrow tail-first. Oh, and those marks on the wall? They were actually claw marks... But not from jaguars...

Holy crap! That is awesome!!

 

[Aepervius]

I suspected that, but I didn't wanna make that call until I checked around.

By now if I see a result suposedly contradicting isotopic dating , evolution, or a few other science religious conservative do not like, I google for a link to a creationist group/institute .

So far it proved right 100%.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Bone, horn, skin, feathers, blood vessels, blood cells, internal cellular organelles, partially digested muscle tissue in coprolite, squid ink. They are all fundamentally different. But they are all organic remnants claimed to be preserved orders of magnitude longer than the traditional consensus asserts as possible.

I haven't heard of all of these types of soft tissue actually being preserved. Where have you?

Originally I read this magazine in the library way back in 2006. [1]

That's the story that got me hooked on soft tissue. Back then of course the evidence was new and very far from conclusive. But the idea of soft tissue from ancient fossils had gone from impossible, to an exciting new possibility. So I have been watching the new discoveries and studies, both for and against, very closely ever since. I am far from an expert, more like an enthusiastic nerd closely watching the events unfold. But I have read literally hundreds of articles on this and related topics due to that enthusiastic interest.

Ink [1][2]
Feathers [3]
Skin [4]
Bone/Horn [5]

 

[EHocking]

oops, wrong thread

 

[Olowkow]

This is a free pdf copy of Armitage's 2013 paper in Acta Histochemica that angered his department and got him fired. It's largely over my head, but might be interesting for dissection by those in the know.

Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur
Triceratops horridus

Here's another discussion with comments by his detractors.
http://www.proof-of-evolution.com/soft-tissues-in-triceratops-horn.html

From this, I found an interesting article about Mary Schweitzer's research on soft tissue in Tyrannosaurus Rex bones.

Ink [1][2]
Feathers [3]
Skin [4]
Bone/Horn [5]

That 5th one is the paper by the YEC duo of Armitage and Anderson that got Armitage fired.

 

[Dinwar]

That 5th one is the paper by the YEC duo of Armitage and Anderson that got Armitage fired.

It's that kind of thing that makese me extremely hesitant to accept any of these findings. It's a very common pattern in the history of science: Someone finds something cool, others start looking for it, and people start seeing it whether it's there or not. Like I said, in 20 years or so the furver will have died down to the point where an honest examination of this stuff is possible. Until then, those not directly involved in the research would do best to sit back, watch the fireworks, but make no firm conclusions.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

That 5th one is the paper by the YEC duo of Armitage and Anderson that got Armitage fired.

Reading the OP I personally doubt the paper got him fired, more like his creationist blog.

Goes back to the conclusions you draw from the evidence. It's one thing to say look, we have this interesting here-to-for unknown material in very old fossils. Quite another to claim that the very existence of that material proves the material isn't old.

Brings up a good point. The man shouldn't have been fired over making a controversial hypothesis. Doesn't even matter if he is completely wrong. You prove him wrong scientifically, not by simply getting rid of him. Prove the material is really old, then another hypothesis must be made as to why the here-to-for unknown material exists. Then falsify the new hypothesis. Keep doing that until something sticks.

 

[Dinwar]

Brings up a good point. The man shouldn't have been fired over making a controversial hypothesis. Doesn't even matter if he is completely wrong. You prove him wrong scientifically, not by simply getting rid of him.

He's a scientist. There is no way to honestly examine the geological evidence and conclude that the world is only thousands of years old. Incompetance is justification for firing even a tenured professor, and outright fraud is another.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

He's a scientist. There is no way to honestly examine the geological evidence and conclude that the world is only thousands of years old. Incompetance is justification for firing even a tenured professor, and outright fraud is another.

Exactly true. Which is why I suspect the real reason for the firing wasn't a published paper (controversial but competent), but rather the creationist blog (incompetent).

 

[Dinwar]

Exactly true. Which is why I suspect the real reason for the firing wasn't a published paper (controversial but competent), but rather the creationist blog (incompetent).

Well, one paper isn't enough to fire someone at any rate--even if it was a flagrantly Creationist piece. It takes a body of work to justify termination. So yeah, I agree that it wasn't one paper. That may have been the final straw, but there was certainly more involved.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Well, one paper isn't enough to fire someone at any rate--even if it was a flagrantly Creationist piece. It takes a body of work to justify termination. So yeah, I agree that it wasn't one paper. That may have been the final straw, but there was certainly more involved.

The paper itself isn't creationist. It simply talks about material found in the fossilised bone.

His private blog is a creationist blog. Not a 6000 YEC creationist, but much younger than the consensus.

The dichotomy comes from this: The biofilm contamination hypothesis is on the ropes, having much evidence against it.

That leaves 2 hypotheses:

1) Organic material can be preserved much longer than previously thought.
2) The organic material is radically younger than previously thought.

The 2nd one is almost exclusively a religious YEC position and has no scientific evidence to support it. The first has evidence, but is still controversial. Many scientists are searching for a new hypothesis because they don't like either 1 or 2.