In Depth Analysis

Are dinosaur remains really millions of years old?

Protein has been found in recently discovered dinosaur bones. If dinosaurs were alive far more recently than believed, it undermines the evolutionary time scale and lines up with the biblical creation account. Long protein chains such as osteocalcin naturally break down over time — their survival in dinosaur bone supports a far younger age for these fossils than commonly claimed.

In 1961, a petroleum geologist discovered a large dinosaur bone bed in northwestern Alaska, containing duckbill, horned, and carnivorous dinosaur remains. It took two decades for scientists to even accept these as dinosaur bones. What's striking is that the bones are still in fresh, unfossilized condition — not preserved by cold, since the planet is understood to have been far warmer even after the dinosaurs' extinction. Fresh bone surviving for a million years or more is highly unlikely, pointing instead to a far more recent deposit.

In 1990, a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton unearthed in Montana yielded something even more remarkable: what appeared to be intact red blood cells inside its blood vessel channels, along with chemical signatures matching hemoglobin. Researcher Mary Schweitzer, working under paleontologist Jack Horner, tried to disprove the finding and could not. Tests for heme's unique reaction to magnetic fields, and immune responses in rats injected with extracts, both pointed to genuine hemoglobin — a protein that should have disintegrated within a few thousand years, not persisted for a claimed 65 million.

This is an excerpt. The full article and companion eBook explore what these discoveries mean for the conventional dinosaur timeline, and what may really have happened to the dinosaurs.