Dinosaur skeleton found with skin and soft tissues intact

[Greg]

"Most of the ones that hit the Earth's atmosphere don't reach the ground, but they set off 'air showers' in which other particles are created, and some of them reach the ground.
"It can affect life in many ways, causing skin cancer, birth defects and other things. Normally, about one-sixth of the penetrating radiation we get down near sea level is from secondaries from cosmic rays."
The authors looked at two forms of radiation formed by solar particle events — muons and neutrons — finding that muons are the most dangerous to biology at the Earth's surface.

- - -

So human and animal flesh can be affected in 50 years, but slightly buried dino bones can stay organic 1,000,000 to 4,000,000 times longer under the same radiation?

Not counting massive solar events that take place every 1000 years or so.  Dino bones have been exposed to what?  10,000 to 200,000 solar flares or gamma ray bursts from nearby stars during that time.

Struggling to understand how 50 years of exposure can affect living creatures and 50-200 million years leaves soft-tissue in Dino bones.

[ABlaine]

I was speaking only of gamma rays, which you had specifically mentioned.

So human and animal flesh can be affected in 50 years, but slightly buried dino bones can stay organic 1,000,000 to 4,000,000 times longer under the same radiation?

Yeah, I mean think about it. You get skin cancer from being in the sun. Go stand under a tree and now it's not a problem. Imagine what a column of dense rock can do... Radiation reaching the earths surface is just such a non-issue that I'm surprised it's the one you've picked. The magnetosphere protects the earth from most forms of solar radiation.

Also, the solar radiation that does reach the earth surface and does come in contact with exposed skin causes a breakdown in the DNA which is why it causes cancer, etc. When an animal is *dead* corruption of DNA doesn't matter because it is, well, dead. DNA is only needed for a living thing to function, it as nothing to do with the preservation of dead organic tissue. Especially dead organic tissue covered by sandstone.

[Habitual_Ritual]

Yeah, I mean think about it. You get skin cancer from being in the sun. Go stand under a tree and now it's not a problem. Imagine what a column of dense rock can do...

And the radio-metric properties of these rocks have no impact? And how long before the rock encased the organic matter?

[Greg]

Unless it is a very thick tree it is still a problem.  Because UV rays bounce off leaves

Try working in an Australian forest all day, under the canopy of eucalyptus, wear a hat and see how much UV light still gets to you.

The products of Gamma Rays penetrate rock.  That's why they put neutrino detectors down deep mines so they don't detect other particles

65,000,000 to 200,000,000 years worth is a lot of radiation.  A million times more than a human gets during their life.

[ABlaine]

Yeah, I mean think about it. You get skin cancer from being in the sun. Go stand under a tree and now it's not a problem. Imagine what a column of dense rock can do...

And the radio-metric properties of these rocks have no impact? And how long before the rock encased the organic matter?

The radiometric properties of a sandstone? As for how long, instances like this require the animal to become encased extremely quickly (in order for an an anaerobic environment to be created before decomposition has really started). So normally it is a mudslide, landslide, and rapid tidal deposition or something. It then becomes a rock as more and more layers are deposited on top of it and the downward pressure increases to a point where a rock is formed. In terms of preserving organic matter, it is really just a matter of really quickly creating an environment hostile to decomposition.

Unless it is a very thick tree it is still a problem.  Because UV rays bounce off leaves

Try working in an Australian forest all day, under the canopy of eucalyptus, wear a hat and see how much UV light still gets to you.

The products of Gamma Rays penetrate rock.  That's why they put neutrino detectors down deep mines so they don't detect other particles

65,000,000 to 200,000,000 years worth is a lot of radiation.  A million times more than a human gets during their life.

What? I could literally be protected from UV radiation by sitting under a piece of cardboard. Either way UV radiation has nothing to do with this as it isn't getting into the ground at all.

They put neutrino detectors deep in the earth because neutrinos are hard to detect with any kind of background radiation. Further they hardly ever interact with anything because of their incredibly unique properties. i don't understand why you think this has anything to do with anything. There are a lot of kinds of radiation and the vast majority reaching the surface of the earth are not going to hurt you. The only really threatening one is UV radiation, which is super easy to deal with.

But all of this is totally moot, because the way radiation is bad for LIFE is that is causes mutations when it interacts with living things. It isn't just going to make dead organic matter disappear into thin air or something. It's a dead animal, long term exposure to almost harmless amounts of radiation (especially when it is under layers and layers of solid rock) isn't just going to make the organic matter disappear. They're not claiming to have found a perfectly intact DNA specimen or something, they are claiming to have found organic tissue.

Again, the last link I gave you will go through all of this stuff much better than I can. but really, why do you have so much tied up in this? If this is true, how does that change anything for you?

[Greg]

The radiometric properties of a sandstone? As for how long, instances like this require the animal to become encased extremely quickly (in order for an an anaerobic environment to be created before decomposition has really started). So normally it is a mudslide, landslide, and rapid tidal deposition or something. It then becomes a rock as more and more layers are deposited on top of it and the downward pressure increases to a point where a rock is formed. In terms of preserving organic matter, it is really just a matter of really quickly creating an environment hostile to decomposition.

You're not likely to get such an environment with Sandstone though.  It is porous.  Over tens of millions of years air and water are going to get to the proteins and decompose them.
Leached water passing through these bones should have fossilized them or rotted them away.

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Men are at war with God.

Science after all tells us that homosexuality is natural.  God says it is an abomination to nature.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/symbiartic/is-homosexuality-natural-yes-so-is-male-lactation/

http://ishomosexualitynatural.com/science-genetic-science-and-homosexuality/

I have to make my mind up one way or the other.

[Pheo]

I'm not sure these people are claiming they could get DNA out of these dinos, but I will say - while fresh tissue is great, we can have a heck of a time isolating DNA even from biopsies if they sit around too long.  My lab uses a next generation sequencing platform, and even with cutting edge technology like that, I get to see the effects of DNA degradation first hand.  Doesn't take that long.

I've also seen more decomposition than I care to remember.  "Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return" is true, but it skips some pretty memorable intermediate steps.  A few days can be bad, but months makes things almost unrecognizable.  There are some exceptions to this, like in the case of adipocere formation, but by and large soft tissue has a heck of a time lasting very long too.  You're not just fighting external elements.  Bacteria inside our bodies don't have the immune system to keep them in check anymore, and boy to they get to work.

[OCLittleFlower]

Under certain conditions organic tissue can be preserved for extremely long periods of time. This isn't too schocking.

This.

They found a frozen pre-historic puppy in Siberia with enough genetic material to be cloned.  Some scientist wants to clone a woolly mammoth, but there's no animal large enough to carry the babies.  A pre-historic dog, on the other hand, could be implanted into a modern dog, no problem.

Brave new world much?

As for the millions of years versus thousand, that's out of my pay grade, I dare say. 

[PerEvangelicaDicta]

As for the millions of years versus thousand, that's out of my pay grade, I dare say. 

Despite peripheral experience, it's out of my pay grade also, but thousands vs millions is the heart of the discussion, I believe.  Well, that and high levels of non-reproducibility in scientific literature nowadays.

[ABlaine]

The radiometric properties of a sandstone? As for how long, instances like this require the animal to become encased extremely quickly (in order for an an anaerobic environment to be created before decomposition has really started). So normally it is a mudslide, landslide, and rapid tidal deposition or something. It then becomes a rock as more and more layers are deposited on top of it and the downward pressure increases to a point where a rock is formed. In terms of preserving organic matter, it is really just a matter of really quickly creating an environment hostile to decomposition.

You're not likely to get such an environment with Sandstone though.  It is porous.  Over tens of millions of years air and water are going to get to the proteins and decompose them.
Leached water passing through these bones should have fossilized them or rotted them away.

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Men are at war with God.

Science after all tells us that homosexuality is natural.  God says it is an abomination to nature.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/symbiartic/is-homosexuality-natural-yes-so-is-male-lactation/

http://ishomosexualitynatural.com/science-genetic-science-and-homosexuality/

I have to make my mind up one way or the other.

"Science" isn't monolithic (get it? Geology joke? You can see why I left this industry...). Considering no one has a discovered a 'gay' gene, the jury is still out on what actually causes homosexuality. Considering there were cultures where it was omnipresent and there were cultures where they couldn't imagine why you would do that, I am led to believe it is an environmental thing more than anything else. But I've never studied this so I don't really know...

Even if being gay turns out being 'natural.' Who cares? Murder and so forth are both natural and oftentimes logical. That doesn't mean that they are right.

But whether or not being gay is genetic is not even remotely related to littlefoot getting caught in a mudslide and found a few million years later.

[Greg]

You act as though juries decide on evidence and well researched argument.

They don't.

The vast majority of people aren't remotely capable of checking the claims and counterclaims of science anymore than they are capable of deciding innocence or guilt in all but the simplest of legal cases.

They can only go on the prevailing narrative, the direction of the judge and their own prejudices.

Ask any specialized scientist why soft tissues were never found in dinosaur bones, 30 years ago, and they would have explained the massive timescales involved and said soft-tissue would have been destroyed eons before by decay.  Then they find soft-tissue and have to come up with all manner of weird explanations as to how it survived 65-200 million years.

The obvious explanation would be that the bones are not in fact millions of years old.  But that is unthinkable since it would destroy their "faith" in evolution.  Evolution is dogma and thus living tissue must somehow have an implausible, untestable narrative to explain to the layman how it survived for 12,000-30,000 times as long as the oldest Egyptian mummies which were DELIBERATELY preserved

[ABlaine]

You act as though juries decide on evidence and well researched argument.

They don't.

The vast majority of people aren't remotely capable of checking the claims and counterclaims of science anymore than they are capable of deciding innocence or guilt in all but the simplest of legal cases.

They can only go on the prevailing narrative, the direction of the judge and their own prejudices.

Ask any specialized scientist why soft tissues were never found in dinosaur bones, 30 years ago, and they would have explained the massive timescales involved and said soft-tissue would have been destroyed eons before by decay.  Then they find soft-tissue and have to come up with all manner of weird explanations as to how it survived 65-200 million years.

The obvious explanation would be that the bones are not in fact millions of years old.  But that is unthinkable since it would destroy their "faith" in evolution.  Evolution is dogma and thus living tissue must somehow have an implausible, untestable narrative to explain to the layman how it survived for 12,000-30,000 times as long as the oldest Egyptian mummies which were DELIBERATELY preserved

What do you have against evolution? Either way, their 'faith' in it isn't coming from the odd fossil that has bits of intact soft tissue (soft tissue that, at this point, is almost a rock)...

But actually they do... the whole point of peer reviewed journals. In a case like this you could (if you were a part of the field) ask for access to the fossil at the university or museum where it will be housed and from there could draw your own conclusions and see if they are like those found in whatever article.

And while the majority of the public isn't able to draw these conlcusions on their own, they could drop by a community college and build a pretty solid foundation for next to no cost... Further your analogy kind of begs the question: you wouldn't tell your lawyer that you understand contract law better than him, so why do you feel qualified to tell these paleontologists that you know you're right and they're wrong?

Lastly, who cares what they thought 30 years ago? The whole point of research is to improve understanding? Denying what is believed now because something different was believed 30 years ago, without trying to understand why the position changed, is absurd.

I still don't understand why this discovery seems to threaten you so much. Like it's not even that interesting, to be honest.

[Greg]

The proposed timescales are massive.  They render biblical history to be a single second on the day of organic life on earth.

Sin came into the world through Adam/Eve.  Two Original Parents.  Without the existence of those parents, Original Sin is a rendered a myth a fable.  There is no way I can conceive off that a tribe of distributed hominids can commit an offence to the creator which would then propagate to the rest of the evolving species.  And how offended can that creator be?  What have they done, that their very slightly less intelligent monkey parents did not do?

I am not REALLY any particular hominid's off-spring.  I might be related to Monkey Man Z from Africa and You to Monkey Woman F from China.  How can many of these humanoids living in different ages and thousands of miles apart, who therefore never met, have committed terrible sins that gives you, I and Xi Ping-Pong from Manchuria the same flaw?

If the first book of the Old Testament is describing a myth that is completely detached from the confirmed and widely believed and agreed reality, then nothing in the rest of the Old Testament can be taken seriously because clearly the men who wrote it did NOT have access to any sort of Divine Knowledge or guiding hand of the Creator to get the essential points right.  The Origin of our species, is a pretty fundamental question affecting our morals, our outlook and our self-perception.  That's why it is in the first book of the Bible.  Because people care about it.  It defines to them who they are and what they are about.

There's no scientist in the world who suggests that the human race has two individuals as the parents of all humans who have lived since.  This proposition has NEVER existed since evolution was first suggested.  Yet, that belief is really fundamental to the doctrine of Original Sin having any credibility or historical consistency.

[Sempronius]

And how about St Paul? Was he duped by Genesis like everybody else?

[Quaremerepulisti]

The vast majority of people aren't remotely capable of checking the claims and counterclaims of science anymore than they are capable of deciding innocence or guilt in all but the simplest of legal cases.

They can only go on the prevailing narrative, the direction of the judge and their own prejudices.

And you seem to be among that majority here, wanting to fit data in with your own prejudices and the anti-science prevailing narrative in traddom.  Which is a little out of character for you, since normally you want the facts and just the facts, regardless of whether you or anyone else likes them or not.

You aren't going to defeat scientism (science can get the answer to EVERYTHING) with scientific epistemological nihilism (science can't get the answer to ANYTHING) or subjectivism (if science gets an answer I don't like, it's wrong).  You only add grist to the scientistic mill, since you come out looking ignorant and ridiculous.

Ask any specialized scientist why soft tissues were never found in dinosaur bones, 30 years ago, and they would have explained the massive timescales involved and said soft-tissue would have been destroyed eons before by decay.  Then they find soft-tissue and have to come up with all manner of weird explanations as to how it survived 65-200 million years.

The obvious explanation would be that the bones are not in fact millions of years old.  But that is unthinkable since it would destroy their "faith" in evolution.  Evolution is dogma and thus living tissue must somehow have an implausible, untestable narrative to explain to the layman how it survived for 12,000-30,000 times as long as the oldest Egyptian mummies which were DELIBERATELY preserved

Do you realize the intellectual and scientific vacuity of this argument?  Look, if you don't want trads to sound like a bunch of ridiculous buffoons (and I know you don't) then you evidently need to up your own game a bit.  Another case of trads being long on rhetoric but really, really short on dialectic and critical thinking.

Think about it.  Let's assume dinosaur bones really are only thousands of years old.  Ask any scientist 30 years ago, even with that assumption, why soft tissue is never found, and he would still tell you they were destroyed by decay over thousands of years.  Now we find soft tissue in dinosaur bones, and there still must be some kind of "weird" explanation to explain how it survived that long.  The "obvious explanation" is that they are not in fact thousands of years old, and scientists are "covering up" the fact that dinosaurs and humans coexisted during the Middle Ages.

But wait.  Let's assume dinosaurs existed during the Middle Ages.  The whole argument repeats itself, with decay happening over hundreds of years and some "weird" explanation needed to account for any soft tissue surviving that long.  Rinse and repeat until we have the "cover up" of dinosaurs living last decade, deposited by space aliens at Area 51.

No, the true "obvious answer" is that there is something peculiar about that particular dinosaur bone which allowed soft tissue to survive, in contrast to most other ones.  Obviously, if it happened to be deposited in a particular area with much more protection from background radiation than is typical, then soft tissue in it could survive, even if the radiation would normally cause it to decay.