The blurb is by David D. Gillette and a reference is
made to the Journal of Vertebrate
Paleontology, Dec 1991.
Seems to me that if this were true it would have
some fairly major repercussions. Does anyone know
more on this discovery?<<
You are referring to the report
"The largest dinosaur ever discovered, Seismosaurus, is probably just a large
Diplodecus. He is supposedly, of course, at least 65 million years old. An
interesting note however is that his bones are not completely fossilized.
They even contain protein, whihc is believed to survive only a few thousand
years, even under the best conceivable conditions. Evolo-scientists are
frantically trying to come up with a story explaining the preservation of
these bones and bone proteins." CSA News, Jan./Feb 1996, p. 2
I have not seen the cited paper, but unfossilized objects are not that
uncommon in the geologic column. Admittedly they get rarer as one moves back
into the early Mesozoic and all of the Paleozoic but they are not unknown.
Mummified microfossils from the Green River formation have been found,
"More remarkable as microfossils are the well-preserved remains of one
rotifer, cephalopodella sp. and two midge larvae that must have just emerged
from their eggs at the time they died." U.S. G.S. Research, Washington:,
1965, p. A127.
Of course there are the relatively recent (ca. 20-50,000 years) mummified
mammoths from Siberia. The Egyptian mummies are more than a few thousand
years old and their protein survives. The iceman found in the Alps was not
fossilized and if I recall correctly was believed to be from 5000 B.C. I have
in my own fossil collection (somewhere) a piece of petrified wood in which
one ring is still wood. This was collected from the eocene Wilcox formation
here in Texas(about 55 million years old). All the other pieces of petrified
wood I found were totally petrified.
I have this fact in my files,
"Among the Cretaceous reptiles, at least one large and extraordinary dinosaur
mummy (Trachodon annectens), which may be seen in the American Museum of
Natural History, New York City." Charles Schuchert and Carl O. Dunbar,
Textbook of Geology, John Wiley and Sons, 1933, p. 435.
Note the date of that source. It is old and it didn't bother anyone. Why?
Because fossilization is somthing that depends on the conditions of burial.
If organic objects are buried in dry environments, they can be mummified
rather than fossilized. If the animal is buried in an environment with lots
of carbonate you can have exquisite fossils in a relatively short time. The
fossil fish of the Champlanian sea (which drained 10,000 years ago are quite
well preserved and totally fossilized.
The problem with CSA mid America is that they think old=fossil. This is not
true. Burial conditions = fossil or not. There are cases of humans being
fossilized in less than 50 years.
glenn