How Soon Will Jurassic Park Open?

In the fictional movie “Jurassic Park” dinosaurs were cloned by obtaining the genetic information necessary to make a dinosaur from ancient DNA (aDNA) sequences extracted from dinosaur blood found in the gut of mosquitoes embedded in amber. Although most scientists still consider the science in Jurassic Park fantasy, acquiring dinosaur DNA has become a possibility over the past few years based on the attempts of sequencing small pieces of aDNA from archaic man and animals. Is it possible that aDNA and other biomolecules such as proteins in extinct organisms could survive environmental conditions well enough for thousands of years, or according to secular scientists, millions of years? In March 2005, Mary Schweitzer and her colleagues published a paper in Science describing the presence of soft tissue (cellular material) in the fossilized femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex unearthed in eastern Montana. Schweitzer et al. reported the presence of structures that appeared to be blood vessels and blood cells with nuclei where DNA could be found. Many of the tissues could be stretched repeatedly and returned to their original shape indicating the presence of elastic proteins commonly found in blood vessels. Pictures of the tissue and experiments comparing the T. rex tissue with ostrich bone tissue appeared to confirm that the material was soft tissue. The presence of soft tissue, which decomposes rapidly after an organism dies, fits the Creation model (asserting that dinosaurs lived recently, in the last 10,000 years) better than an evolutionary scenario making dinosaurs older than 65 million years. However, the environmental factors responsible for preserving soft tissues in fossilized bone are unknown, and until they are determined, creationists as well as evolutionists can’t be sure if there is a mechanism that preserves soft tissue indefinitely. After all, until the Schweitzer discovery, it was not believed that intact blood vessels and blood cells, which normally decompose rapidly upon death, could still be in a dinosaur bone after even a few years—much less 10,000 years or 65 million years. June 2006 “VITAL ARTICLES ON SCIENCE/CREATION”