124 W. Main, P.O. Box 550, Crosbyton, TX
79322
(806) 675-7777 (806) 675-2421 (Fax)
T-Rex Collagen
Discovered!
Collagen
filaments
found in another T-rex bone.
Do we believe it is 65
million years old?
In 1995, the museum
in
New Castle Wyoming gave Joe Taylor a small piece of bone
from the hip of a T-rex. This T-rex was found in about 1916. Taylor
sent a piece
of the bone to California to be electron scanned by professor Mark
Armitage at
Azusa Pacific College.
Joe just wanted to see if
it was bone or muscle. "I held part of the hip girdle
of this rex in my lap to examine it. It appeared to have skin on
the sacral
vertebrae."
After scanning the bone
fragment, Armitage reported to Taylor that it was in
fact bone...but, there were collagen filaments inside it! He went on to
say that,
"It can't be but a few thousand years old."
Soft tissue in bone that
is supposed to be 65 million years old should present
a real problem for standard evolution beliefs.
This T-rex was found a
few miles from the famous hadrosaur excavated by the
Sternbergs in the late 1800s on the ranch now owned by the Zerbst.
Recently the
Larsen brothers at the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota have
excavated a
triceratops from the Zerbst ranch and it has part of its skin
preserved. (See
our photo of it.)
In 1995, Taylor led a dig
with FACT on the Glenn Hanson ranch, which is a few
miles from the other three animals with skin on them. A short distance
from the
FACT site Dr. Kraig Derstler excavated a partial hadrosaur mummy. The
FACT
crew, specifically Otis Kline and Bob Helfenstine, started excavating a
hadrosaur.
Taylor feels strongly that it too had skin preserved. In all these
finds, there
is the potential for preservation of soft tissue.
The
recent story, which has been all over the web about the T-rex
with soft tissue in its femur, has really caused some excitement.
This may
be the same T-rex that Jack Horner excavated a few years ago that was
reported
to have red blood cells in it. Taylor noticed it had a Museum
Of The
Rockies number, suggesting that it was one of a half dozen T-rexes
found in
Montana.
I'm
sure that most die-hard evolutionists will just conclude that this only
proves
that dinosaur soft tissue can last for 65 million years. We don't
believe it
here at Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum.
