false alarm, nothing to see here, move along...

[acroyear]

Greg Laden's Blog : The seductive siren of soft tissue preservation: Ancient dinosaur flesh wasn't ancient. Or dinosaur flesh.:

Back in 2005, resarch published in Science claimed that blood vessels and blood cells were found inside fossil bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

But now, researchers, in the current paper in PLoS, claim that the substance observed inside the dino bones is dried up biofilm. Bioflim is the brown yeck that forms on surfaces under water. Do you have a fish tank? That brown stuff that the snails eat. Since biofilm forms on surfaces, it can actually form the basis of an endocast ... a fossil of the inside shape of something. In addition to endocasts, mineralogical accretions can also form inside bone tissues to resemble biological tissues.

According to Thomas Kaye, one of the study's authors and an associate researcher at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, "I believed that preserved soft tissues had been found, but I had to change my opinion.... You have to go where the science leads, and the science leads me to believe that this is bacterial biofilm."

I almost feel sorry for the (YE) creationists, as they were hoping for this as some smoking gun that dinosaurs couldn't possibly be as old as they really are...

...almost.

Comments

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

Look for Salvador T. "Wormtongue" Cordova to selectively quote the study to pretend it says exactly the opposite of what it clearly actually says. And blame someone for eugenics.

[wildwose.livejournal.com]

Woah there partner...not so fast now.

And to be completely clear...I Am Not A Young Earther! I am deeply committed to evolution and science.

I have been following this closely and there is several stories about this study out there.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2008-07-29-fossils_N.htm

Microscopic views of bones can't explain why the fossil tissues reacted to the immune cells of chickens, for example, and the mammoth ones reacted with elephant cells....-Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University

However, Kaye acknowledges his study does not refute the immune responses reported by Schweitzer's team. "They have single handedly pioneered the use of sophisticated chemical analysis and have created a critical bridge between biology and paleontology," he says.

More analyses of the suspect tissues are underway, Schweitzer says. "I guess the best I can say is: Stay tuned!"

I'll admit it, I am pretty fired up about the whole idea and want it to be true, that they are dino proteins. But naturally, that is not science and I prefer Science. So I will withhold my bias and wait for more studies.