Biological material from an allegedly "150-million" year old Archaeopteryx
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported the discovery of various types of original biological material in the bird feathers and bones of archaeopteryx that allegedly have survived for 150 million years. The New Scientist report, Soft tissue remnants discovered in Archaeopteryx, stated:
"It boasts more than just... impressions of long-gone feathers. One of the world's most famous fossils... Archaeopteryx – also contains remnants of the feathers' soft tissue. ... 'It's amazing that that chemistry is preserved after 150 million years.' ... paleontologists had long thought that only impressions remained. [But] "There is soft-tissue chemistry preserved in places that people didn't expect it," says [geochemist Roy] Wogelius."
Unlike most dinosaur-era soft-tissue discoveries published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, with this specimen not enough biological material was discovered to call it tissue, but only remnants of tissue remain. For excerpts and a comprehensive list of the peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals confirming these discoveries, see DinsoaurSoftTissue.com/research. Far from being trumpeted as the paleontological discovery of the century, the public remains largely unaware of the existence of original biological material from "dinosaur-era" fossils.
Of course, if these stunning discoveries were predicted by and reinforced the Darwinian, old-earth worldview, the world would get regular updates on the evening news and in the front pages of newspapers and magazines. But as late as August, 2012, most evolutionists among the general public whom the Real Science Radio radio hosts talk to:
​
-
have never even heard of these developments
-
initially deny them (soft-tissue deniers)
-
assume that it must be creationists who claim to have found them, and
-
claim, as PZ Myers did when criticizing Real Science Radio, the repeatedly debunked hope that these are not actual dinosaur tissue but bacterial biofilm contamination.