Scientist Fired for Discovering Something-Dinosaur soft tissue

Jacie Estes

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The Pacific Justice Institute reports the following: “A scientist was terminated from his job at a California State University after discovering soft tissue on a triceratops fossil, and then publishing his findings. . . . While at a dig at Hell Creek formation in Montana, the scientist, Mark Armitage, came upon the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site. When examining the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Armitage was fascinated to see the soft tissue. The discovery stunned members of the scientific community because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.”
Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/16394/...ng-publishing-discovered/#GL2BR7jtysCKWku7.99


We already have to watch out for deer/elk and moose, now we have to watch for triceratops, too. :gaah:
 
Yep the truth must not be known...isn't that sad! Hope he has some kind of legal recourse!!!!
 
Not a scientist, but - isn't it possible for soft tissue to last for a very long time under certain circumstances? I'm thinking of mastodons found under glaciers, bodies in peat bogs, etc. Why does finding soft tissue automatically mean that that scientific dates are changed?

I did a quick google and this article seems to explain Schweitzer's research well, and in a matter of fact way without the slant of the above article. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/soft-tissue-dinosaur-fossil1.htm
 
You may have heard that paleontologist Mary Schweitzer and colleagues have extracted some soft tissue remnants from the Cretaceous dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus and the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus. These claims have been controversial, but they cannot be discounted. Schweitzer and others have built a startling argument that in exceptional cases, fragments of original dinosaur protein may have survived to this day. But that’s not what we need to clone a dinosaur. The starting point of any dinosaur resurrection exercise is DNA. Unfortunately for paleo nerds such as myself, DNA has a relatively short half life. There’s virtually no chance of ever recovering dinosaur genetic material. http://mentalfloss.com/article/49757/will-we-ever-be-able-clone-dinosaurs



Can soft tissue be used to clone?
 
This is a wiki clone but it has good info and links at bottom: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Soft_tissue_preservation

Not a scientist, but - isn't it possible for soft tissue to last for a very long time under certain circumstances? I'm thinking of mastodons found under glaciers, bodies in peat bogs, etc. Why does finding soft tissue automatically mean that that scientific dates are changed?

I did a quick google and this article seems to explain Schweitzer's research well, and in a matter of fact way without the slant of the above article. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/soft-tissue-dinosaur-fossil1.htm
 
Fossil Cuttlefish Has Original Tissue
by Brian Thomas, M.S. *

Cuttlefish are mollusks that look somewhat like squid. They have an internal, hard, supportive structure with soft organs around and inside it. This resilient "cuttlebone" is made of cleverly woven strands of a biochemical material called chitin and mixed with a hard biomineral called aragonite.

A team of paleontologists found a supposedly 34 million-year-old fossil cuttlebone that still had both the original aragonite and chitin. This is significant, because one might expect the hard aragonite to persist in the fossil record, but not the organic chitin or protein. The chitin, which is made of sugars tightly bonded into molecular chains, would have spontaneously degraded and been long gone after only thousands of years.

The researchers compared the fossil cuttlebone, found in a Mississippi clay deposit, with modern cuttlebone chitin, and their results showed a "shortening of the chitin strands,…the breakdown of chitosan [chemically altered chitin],… and loss of hydrogen bonds."1 Thus, the chitin has been falling apart, as would be expected based on chitin biochemistry.


http://www.icr.org/article/6509/
 
Not a scientist, but - isn't it possible for soft tissue to last for a very long time under certain circumstances? I'm thinking of mastodons found under glaciers, bodies in peat bogs, etc. Why does finding soft tissue automatically mean that that scientific dates are changed?

I did a quick google and this article seems to explain Schweitzer's research well, and in a matter of fact way without the slant of the above article. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/soft-tissue-dinosaur-fossil1.htm

Thank you, and yes, indeed. Your link discusses the find without the "Creationism" bias of the original link. (No disrespect to Jacie Estes who was merely sharing something she had found.)
 
In an article published in the journal PLoS One on July 20, 2008, researchers Thomas G. Kaye, Gary Gaugler and Zbigniew Sawlowicz argue just that. This team conducted more than 200 hours of scanning electron microscope analysis on a variety of dinosaur fossils. It came to the conclusion that Schweitzer's samples contained framboids, and the apparent soft tissue was essentially pond scum. Through carbon dating, the team also determined that the material was modern, not prehistoric [source: Kaye et al.]

Sorry, but yeah. No.

Also, re the scientist in the original article:

Armitage is a member of the Creation Research Society and has served on its board of directors since 2006.
 
My friend, who originally sent me the story, and I have both studied in the Anthropology Program at University of Nevada-Reno. We were discussing the political aspect of academia.

Thank you, and yes, indeed. Your link discusses the find without the "Creationism" bias of the original link. (No disrespect to Jacie Estes who was merely sharing something she had found.)
 
I spent two decades in academia and you don't have to explain the politics to me. But the original blog is heavily slanted (politics!) and it turns out the professor in question was fired for academic fraud, NOT because he espoused an unpopular theory.

The very position of creationist fundamentalism (looking for evidence of a young earth because that's what Genesis implies when read literally) is the very antithesis of scientific method. A scientist doesn't form a conclusion based on loyalty to an ancient text and then look for evidence to support that loyalty. He or she looks at the evidence and then creates hypotheses that will explain the evidence.

None of this has anything to do with believing there is a God or that H/She created the universe. It has to do with scientific method and those who cannot follow it OUGHT to be fired.

Science is a wide tent, but it is not exactly a democratic process.

(If you want to explore politics in academic science, check out the so-called "Clovis Boundary", which holds that the remains found in Clovis, NM, represent the first humans to cross the land bridge into North American from Asia. The problem is there are numerous sites which seem ever older, but those who discover them are afraid to publish for fear of being banned by the Old Guard, which is still attached to the Clovis hypothesis. This is beginning to change, but it has been a problem for some time. Perhaps you discussed it in Anthropology.

But this is human nature: older people remaining attached to the "glory discoveries" of their youth. That's a far cry from choosing a book at random and rejecting all evidence that suggests the ancient text may not be a literal, eyewitness account.)
 
Is there anyway we can change the title of this thread?

There is no evidence that the professor in question was fired for discovering real, soft tissue.
 

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