46 replies to this topic

[capeo]

The most ridiculous thing about all these T-Rex "soft tissue" threads is the idea that this somehow changes the grand timeline.  It doesn't.  The bone was still 65 million years old.  Its fantastic because we could learn a lot from it.  Specifically about the process of fossilization.  You might see a lot dino hip bones being cracked open and demineralized in the coming years though.

That said, I think you will find, as has been stated in the most recent report that the structures said to look like blood vessels and cells will turn out to part of the mineralization process and whats left will be devoid of real cell structure or DNA.  Would be great if they could extract DNA but I doubt it.

Oh, Iamson, there is no such thing as an evolutionist by the way.  There is no field called Evolutionism.  Evolutionary Theory is part and parcel, completely inseparable, from every field of biological study today though.  Its not going away because it explains everything we see from the cellular level up to greater morphology.  Its predicitions are testable and have withstood years of scrutiny from just about every field of science, and I mean every field, and its only become more supported by such scrutiny.  Why are you so afraid of it?

[ivytheplant]

Quote

The most ridiculous thing about all these T-Rex "soft tissue" threads is the idea that this somehow changes the grand timeline.  It doesn't.  The bone was still 65 million years old.

I know, that drives me up the freaking wall. People take new info and run with it, claiming that the new evidence means all the research we've done until now is completely invalidated and we might as well give in and proclaim Christian Creationism as the one true creation story (which I'm sure the hundreds of other religions of the world might have a few things to say about).

What people don't seem to understand is that science is always changing. The very first thing we were taught in geology is that tomorrow what we know could be different because of new research and new evidence. However, that doesn't mean what we learn today is completely worthless. Today is merely the foundation of what we'll learn tomorrow. Just because we have to change our way of thinking about a piece of bone doesn't mean the rest of it is completely meaningless.

The other thing is how when one little piece of evidence that changes how we view the world (remember when we realized dinosaurs weren't lumbering swamp creatures?), it's as if a free license has been given for the "other side" to go nuts and scream that our entire world view has been torn apart and everything before was false. Which is just ridiculous of course. Just because we find a bone that is fossilized differently than another doesn't mean that suddenly we have to rewrite the laws of physics and declare the entire field of paleontology to be invalidated. Sheesh.