Soft Tissue Surviving 65 Million Years?

Schweitzer's group has just published on some further work where they found remnants of collagen in an 80Ma hadrosaur, too. There's nothing wrong with the dates: there just appears to be something about preservation inside a bone that we don't know the details of yet. Plenty of palaeontologists are skeptical of her work, too, though this replication of the tyrannosaur find sure seems to help her case a great deal.Science, v324, pp626-631, 1 May 2009 - and I can email you a pdf if you want one - see my profile.

Malcolm: you have the point exactly. Without knowing, for instance, how much water was present in the bones and whether the minerals of the bone offer some hindrance to water attack, calculation means nothing.

Schweitzer's research appears to have proved it can happen already. The question now is how collagen bits get preserved for 80 million years.Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.

"The specimen was incorporated within a soft, well-sorted sandstone that was interpreted as estuarine in origin." - so it was at a river mouth. And the tyrannosaur was in the Hell Creek, which has been dated seven ways from Sunday as being ~65 million years old.
Science 25 March 2005: Vol. 307. no. 5717, pp. 1952 - 1955, and it's free at sciencemag.orgThere's nothing wrong with the dating, Sleve, just with our current understanding of collagen preservation. As I mentioned upthread, perhaps there's an interaction between the minerals of the fossilizing bone and the protein that stabilizes bits of the latter.The newer Schweitzer study took rather extraordinary care to avoid contamination and to replicate findings. I'm a chemist, not a palaeontologist, but I sure can't see any holes in their methodology. You can bet that a dozen bright young grad students scattered around the world are on the trail of how the preservation occurs.

In the case of the Hell Creek, there's a review here (pdf). The 80 Ma hadrosaur is from the Judith River formation in Montana: it's interbedded with bentonite, which is volcanic in origin and so datable by potassium-argon and/or uranium methods. Google Scholar has 14,000 hits.

Obvious nonsense, Lucy. Does the Moon not orbit the earth where you live? Does the Sun not orbit in the Milky Way? Do pulsars not pulse in the Lucyverse?Don't be silly.

ROFL. You're stuck in the 1400's? In a geocentric universe that's more geocentric than the Sumerians? And, in any case, the orbital period of the Moon is not tied to the length of a day or year. Does that mean it doesn't tell time?If you are actually a tool, you seem to be on the order of a Acheulean handax.