The Cryptozoologist

KASAI REX, BURRUNJOR, AND MINI-T-REX: EVIDENCE OF SURVIVING CARNIVOROUS DINOSAURS? PART 3

IS THERE ANY HARD SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE THAT DINOSAURS MAY HAVE EXISTED MORE RECENTLY THAN MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO?

Red Blood Cells Found in Dinosaur Fossils

Actual red blood cells in fossil bones from a Tyrannosaurus rex? With traces of the blood protein hemoglobin (which makes blood red and carries oxygen)? It sounds preposterous—to those who believe that these dinosaur remains are at least 65 million years old.

It is of course much less of a surprise to those who believe in a young earth, in which case dinosaur remains are at most only a few thousand years old.

In a recent article, scientists from Montana State University, seemingly struggling to allow professional caution to restrain their obvious excitement at the findings, report on the evidence which seems to strongly suggest that traces of real blood from a T-rex have actually been found.

The story starts with a beautifully preserved T-rex skeleton unearthed in the United States in 1990. When the bones were brought to the Montana State University's lab, it was noticed that "some parts deep inside the long bone of the leg had not completely fossilized." To find unfossilized dinosaur bone is already an indication more consistent with a young age for the fossils.

The Report

Let Mary Schweitzer, the scientist most involved with this find, take up the story of when her co-workers took turns looking through a microscope at a thin section of this T-rex bone, complete with blood vessel channels.

The lab filled with murmurs of amazement, for I had focused on something inside the vessels that none of us had ever noticed before: tiny round objects, translucent red with a dark center. Then a colleague took one look at them and shouted, "You've got red blood cells. You've got red blood cells!".

Schweitzer confronted her boss, famous paleontologist "Dinosaur" Jack Horner, with her doubts about how these could really be blood cells. Horner suggested she try to prove they were not red blood cells, and she says, "So far, we haven't been able to."

Looking for dinosaur DNA in such a specimen was obviously tempting. However, fragments of DNA can be found almost everywhere—from fungi, bacteria, human fingerprints—and so it is hard to be sure that one has DNA from the specimen. The Montana team did find, along with DNA from fungi, insects and bacteria, unidentifiable DNA sequences, but could not say that these could not have been jumbled sequences from present-day organisms. However, the same problem would not be there for hemoglobin, the protein which makes blood red and carries oxygen, so they looked for this substance in the fossil bone.

The Evidence

The evidence that hemoglobin has indeed survived in this dinosaur bone (which casts immense doubt upon the "millions of years" idea) is, to date, as follows:

The tissue was colored reddish brown, the color of hemoglobin, as was liquid extracted from the dinosaur tissue.

Hemoglobin contains heme units. Chemical signatures unique to heme were found in the specimens when certain wavelengths of laser light were applied.

Because it contains iron, heme reacts to magnetic fields differently from other proteins—extracts from this specimen reacted in the same way as modern heme compounds.

To ensure that the samples had not been contaminated with certain bacteria which have heme (but never the protein hemoglobin), extracts of the dinosaur fossil were injected over several weeks into rats. If there was even a minute amount of hemoglobin present in the T-rex sample, the rats' immune system should build up detectable antibodies against this compound. This is exactly what happened in carefully controlled experiments.

Evidence of hemoglobin, and the still-recognizable shapes of red blood cells, in unfossilized dinosaur bone is powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago.

[Cryptozoologist's Note: To claim that bone could remain intact for millions of years without being fossilized (mineralized) stretches credibility. The report here of red blood cells in an unfossilized section of dinosaur bone is NOT the first time such bone has been found. Biologist Dr. Margaret Helder reported documented finds of "fresh", unfossilized dinosaur bone as far back as 1992. More recently, based on these reports, a team associated with Buddy Davis from Northern Kentucky, retrieved similarly unfossilized dinosaur bone from Alaska.]

A mummified dinosaur fossil was found by amateur researchers in 2000 in Malta, Montana. Due to the mummification process it underwent, it retained original skin impressions with possibly some of the original tissue still intact. Dubbed "Leonardo," this hadrosaur is "the most complete dinosaur fossil ever discovered," and even has a mummified stomach containing magnolia, fern, and conifer vegetation. The Discovery Channel aired a program about Leonardo on September 15, 2008.

The scientists who have analyzed the specimen say its body was subjected to a natural but extremely unusual mummification process after it died, preserving not just bones but skin and soft tissues.

"When you get up close and look at the skin envelope it's beautiful. This is not a skin impression, it's fossilized skin. That's very, very different," said Dr Phil Manning, the paleontologist at Manchester University who has led the investigation.

The "dinosaur mummy" is a 3,600 kilogram (4 ton) hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, that evolutionists believe died 65 to 67 million years ago—shortly before evolutionary theory proposes that all the other dinosaurs went extinct, possibly due to a massive meteorite impact.

What makes this fossil unique was what happened next. Skin and soft tissues are not usually present in fossils because they rot down quickly before fossilization takes place. But in this case, one of just a handful of such specimens ever found, something unusual about the chemistry of the mud the beast ended up in meant that didn't happen.

"You've got a chemical reaction going on where minerals are forming more rapidly than the microbes are decaying the soft tissues—so you are left with soft tissue structures preserved," said Manning.

Leonardo has puzzled researchers for years, and paleopathologist Arthur Aufderheide of the University of Minnesota at Duluth, an expert in mummified remains, was called in to help answer some important questions about the fossil, including: "Why did nothing eat him? Why did his flesh and internal structures not rot away like virtually every other fossil ever found up until Leonardo?"

This might mystify old earth adherents, but Leonardo's uniquely preserved remains do not surprise young earth scientists. Their model, which factors in the probable violent effects of a worldwide Flood, seems to provide a better explanatory paradigm than a slow-and-gradual evolutionary view.

Young earth scientists have proposed that one of the Flood's effects could have been "hypercanes," or mega-hurricanes that were unchecked by land masses. This seems to match a current evolutionary theory regarding the fossils found near Leonardo:

Dr. David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada has said that a massive extinction occurred when hurricanes, starting in what was then the Gulf of Mexico, traveled through a shallow ocean….They grew stronger and created storm surges, including in what is now Montana, which created massive flooding that would have killed everything, Iacuzzo said…."That's one theory on why you find so many complete skeletons in that area."

This evidence in Montana of super-sized hurricanes and catastrophic burial could well be a local manifestation of a global catastrophic event like the Flood.

WOULD A SURVIVING TYRANNOSAURUS BE AS LARGE AS THE FOSSILIZED SPECIMENS THAT HAVE BEEN RECOVERED?

Catastrophists are scientists who believe that the earth has not always been the same, but has changed dramatically over time as the result of global catastrophes, (such as the worldwide Flood mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts). They believe that the ancient world was once surrounded by a large vapor canopy, which later collapsed, contributing to a global flood that destroyed most of the life on earth. Such a vapor canopy would have shielded the earth from harmful radiation from the sun and spread incoming solar heat with a greenhouse effect, providing a constant spring-like climate for the entire earth, including the polar regions. It is postulated that this large water vapor canopy would have caused about double the present atmospheric pressure making it easier to breathe, easier for birds to fly and providing for extremely lush vegetation. It would also have provided an environment in which everything (animals, plants and people) would have grown to a larger size.

Evidence of this is found in the fossil record with fossil dragon flies having 30-inch wingspans, fossil cockroaches 14 inches long, and fossil cattails 60 feet tall. Reptiles are peculiar in that they never stop growing as long as they live. Alligators, for example, are reptiles and grow larger until they die. How large might an alligator become today if raised in an environment of double atmospheric pressure, no radiation, and a super abundance of food? Even animals and plants that only grow for a limited portion of their lives could have grown much larger and lived much longer in such an atmosphere. Tomato plants, grown in Japan under double atmospheric pressure and shielded from radiation, have reached 30 feet in height and produced 3,000 tomatoes on each plant. They also became perennial, meaning they never needed to be replanted.

Consequently, surviving descendants of the dinosaurs (or any other species for that matter) would not necessarily be as large as their ancient ancestors. This seems to be born out by the eyewitness descriptions of such cryptids as Mokele-mbembe and the so-called "Mini T-rex's" which have been the topic of this posting.

Mokele-mbembe (Mokèlé-mbèmbé) meaning "one who stops the flow of rivers" in the Lingala language, is the name given to a large water-dwelling cryptid found in the legends and folklore of the Congo River basin. According to the traditions of the Congo River basin the Mokele-mbembe is a large territorial herbivore, approximately the size of a small elephant or a large hippopotamus. It dwells in the Congo river and the surrounding swampland, and has a preference for deep water, with local folklore holding that its haunts of choice are river bends. Descriptions of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé vary. Some legends describe it as having an elephant-like body with a long neck and tail and a small head, making it similar in appearance to the extinct Sauropoda. Among the smallest sauropods were the primitive Anchisaurus (2.4 meters or 7 feet long) and Ohmdenosaurus (4 meters or 13 feet long), the dwarf titanosaur Magyarosaurus (5.3 meters or 17 feet long), and the dwarf brachiosaurid Europasaurus, which was 6.2 meters (20 feet) long as a fully-grown adult. At 15 to 30 feet (9.1 m) long, the Mokele-mbembe could either be a full-size surviving descendent of one of these smaller sauropods, or a diminutive version of one of the ancient colossal sauropods.