Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart shares news items from the latest Creation magazine including one on unfossilized dinosaur tissue that turns out to be incorrect. (See below for the widely used ambiguous terminology that sometimes misleads science reporters and bloggers into presuming that the discovery of dinosaur "soft tissue" means original biological material, when often, what the term refers to is permineralized soft tissue, i.e., stone that has taken the shape of the dead creature.) Other topics include Yosemite's El Capitan rockslide, NASA's Solar Probe, and a quasar, the transient iPTF 16bco, grew ten times brighter not over thousands but in one year! And then there's the request that you help us find RSR's missing underwriter (see below). We need an underwriter (perhaps you!) to put our full Global Flood video on YouTube so it can be viewed freely by a wider audience. Doing so will mean our sales of the video will end. So we are looking for a gift of $10,000 from an underwriter (that can be you!) to put this resource freely online and to bring us from $23,500 (updated on 9/30/17) to put us over our telethon goal of $30,000! Just call 1-800-8Enyart (83k6-9278) or email Bob@rsr.org or go to rsr.org and click on the store. Thank you for your consideration!
* Example of Need to Clarify Paleontology Terminology: RSR provides a list of diagnostic terms (below) to help determine whether a soft tissue paper is referenciong only permineralized (i.e., stone) fossils, or specimens that still retain endogenous biomaterials. In the age of sequencing endogenous dinosaur proteins, etc., the term "soft tissue" should be used with more care to clarify whether the claim is for merely permineralized, or still biological, remains. Perhaps the best general term to refer to dinosaur and other organisms that have endogenous biomaterial is to call it a biomaterial fossil. Such ambiguity (though avoidable by a careful reading of the paper) led to confusion in an article, Soft Tissue in Fossil Dinosaur Brains, published in the current October 2017 issue of Creation magazine (Vol. 39, Num. 4) on page 7. (Update: The editors thanks RSR for the notification and printed a correction in the next edition.) That piece is based on the 2016 Geological Society of London Special Publication, Remarkable preservation of brain tissues in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur. Here's what the Creation article concluded from that paper:
- "in 2016, researchers... reported not just fossilized brains, but unfossilized brain tissue"
- this allegedly 133 million-year-old "fossil... was found to contain unfossilized protein fragments--brain tissue, fine capillaries, collagen structures, and the membrane that surrounds the brain."
This is just the latest problem resulting from the ambiguity of "soft tissue" reports. To make matters worse, the GSL paper, as is common among paleontologists, refer to "blood vessels" and "collagen" when they actually mean permineralized vessels and collagen bands. However, the paper doesn't use terms, such as "unfossilized" and "protein fragments", that would have indicated a biomaterial fossil.
* Diagnostic Terms that Indicate a Biomaterlal Fossil: By default, a scientific paper reporting on a "soft tissue" discovery will be referencing stone artefacts, i.e., permineralized skin and scale impressions, feathers, internal organs replaced with phosphates, carbonates, etc. When reading a "soft tissue" paper, you can usually determine whether it is referring only to permineralized fossils if contains a number of the following biomaterial diagnostic terms:
- endogenous, endogeneity
- molecule, molecular
- sub-cellular, cellular, cell, red blood cells
- proteinaceous
- fragments [not bone or carbonized wood, for example, but protein fragments]
- protein [but not used as in "protein replacement by calcium phosphate", etc.]
- sequence [as in the amino acid sequences in a protein, an RNA, or a double helix]
- beta-keratin, tubulin, actin, tropomyosin, myosin, hemoglobin, heme, osteocytes, pigment, melanosomes
- spectral signature
- peptide, biomolecules, biomarkers, biochemistry
- nucleic acid, DNA
- amino acids, chirality
- organic, organic compounds [but not of course a use like "organic decay"]
- flexibility, pliable, still-soft, transparent
- immunology, immunological, immunofluorescence
- antibodies
- antigenic, antigenicity
- collagenase, digestion
- unfossilized
- contamination, contaminants, biofilm
And as stated above, again, be careful with terms often used ambiguously, including collagen, blood vessels, even capillaries (as in the above GSL paper) soft tissue, etc., all of which are used somewhat carelessly in the latest issues of paleontological and other scientific journals. (For a spreadsheet catalog of these discoveries and links to the published papers, see tiny.cc/biomaterial-fossils-list.)
* Help Find RSR's Missing Underwriter: Imagine if you organized a Global Flood Seminar at a coliseum for less than $1 per person for the evening and you filled the place with 20,000 interested people! Would that be worth the investment to you? The equivalent of doing exactly that is possible and here's how you (yes you) can make it happen!
You can underwrite putting Real Science Radio's full Global Flood and Hydroplate Theory video online so that we can bring it to at least another 20,000 people, young and old! Here at RSR we are eager to publish our full flood video on YouTube except that when we do, because it will be freely available to everyone for viewing, we will lose our ability to sell the video. So to do both, to make sure that RSR can financially stay on the air, and to present our full video online for free viewing, we need a $10,000 underwriter to make both of these things possible.
According to Google's Analytics, our BEL/RSR YouTube channel has over 300,000 views during which people have invested 29,000 hours watching and learning from our videos
Currently, our most popular YouTube videos are:
38,900 views: pro-life
35,800 views: evaluating a criminal case
25,500 views: Bob's theology debate with James White (+7k audio version)
21,600 views: Hydroplate Theory (this only shows excerpts; as a reminder, for the full video, here's the cover and contents):
Real Science Radio co-host Bob Enyart presents the scientific evidence for Dr. Walt Brown’s model of the global flood, along with the relevant biblical material. Enyart also discusses Brown's opponents and contrasts both the vapor canopy and catastrophic plate tectonics with the hydroplate theory.
DVD Vol. 1:
1. Walt Brown, Creation Leaders, and Scripture
2. Hydroplate Theory & Scientific Evidence
DVD Vol. 2:
3. Hydroplates vs. Plate Tectonics
Bonus: Origin of Earth's Radioactivity
Getting an additional 20,000 interested viewers (as we expect that we will, and more, over time) is many more than would see it as compared to just those who buy it over a five-year period through our radio program and online store. So, timed to put our annual September telethon over the top (we have currently raised $23,500 of our $30,000 goal), we are asking you (yes you!) to consider becoming an underwriter. $10,000 can subsidize the publication of RSR's full flood video online. (And yes, we could add an underwriters credit or a thank you to the YouTube posting.) If you are interested, please call 1-800-8Enyart (836-9278), email Bob@rsr.org, PayPal the funds to SecurePayment@kgov.com, or send a check payable to BEL, PO Box 583, Arvada, CO 80001. (And here are those excerpts, but if you watch this, please don't get so interested that you forget to consider becoming our underwriter! :)
Thank you so much for your consideration! -Bob Enyart