Soft Tissue in a Dinosaur Bone

In 2005 a scientist named *Mary Schweitzer* published something that surprised the whole world of paleontology.

Working on a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone, she and her team found material inside it that nobody expected: flexible, see-through, branching structures that looked like blood vessels, and soft stretchy fibrous tissue. Not stone. *Soft.* Later work reported fragments of collagen, which is the protein that makes up bone and skin.²

Think about how strange that is. Soft tissue is the first thing to rot when a creature dies — it is usually gone in weeks. Finding any of it inside a fossil bone was so unexpected that scientists checked it, and other laboratories went looking and found similar things in other fossils. This is not a rumour. It is real, published, careful science.

*Now here is where this book will be careful with you, because most books are not. You may hear someone say "scientists found soft tissue, so they admit the earth is young." That is not true, and you should not say it. Dr. Schweitzer is a Christian, and she does not think her discovery means a young earth. Scientists are still arguing about how* the material survived — she has suggested iron from blood may have helped preserve it, and others disagree.

So say the true thing, which is remarkable enough: *nobody expected this to still be there, and nobody has settled how it survived.* That is honest, and no one can argue you out of it.