A similar incident came up a while ago, and as usual, the creationists jumped to sensationalism:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.html#Schweitzeretal1997a

@PhilosophyOfJoel - You have to hit "reply" if you ever want QuantumStorm to know you replied to his comment. Otherwise, we'll never see this heated debate play out.

@PhilosophyOfJoel - You actually didn't read the TalkOrigins article properly. They already addressed the article you brought up. (The TO article was dated from 2004-2006, updated in February 2004).

The point is that Wieland has a habit of distorting reports in order to support his claims.

And this recent discovery is nothing new. Yet another incident in 2005 sparked the same creationist hullabaloo -

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/flesh.html

The notion of well-preserved flesh is neither new nor a problem for evolutionary biology. It's well-known that given the right conditions, proteins can maintain primary and even secondary structures for a long period of time. It's a matter of avoiding the factors that lead to denaturation that make a significant difference. What I'm expecting from the creationist camp is yet another redux of Wieland's distortions.

@PhilosophyOfJoel - The whole point about TO's article was to refute WIELAND's claims that hemoglobin was found. Of course TO cannot show hemoglobin was found in those discoveries, since none was found in the first place, which was Schweitzer et al's findings as well. I'm not sure why you're trying to prove my point, because my point about the 1997 reference was that they didn't find intact hemoglobin. In the 2002 article, Wieland still maintained the claim that intact blood was found, even though Schweitzer et al and others pointed out that it was NOT found at all. Wieland accuses the other side of disingenuity because their findings did not fit his original sensationalism. That's hardly professional for someone to claim disingenuity when the findings weren't actually in his/her favor.

Between Schweitzer, a scientist who was actually involved in the study and who stood by her claims despite the controversy it brought up, and Wieland, a person NOT in the expeditions and with a vested interest in twisting the evidence to support creationism, I'd believe the former.

// It is well know that Proteins and DNA cannot last the long periods of time assumed by evolutionist.//

Can you show me proof that proteins and DNA cannot last long periods of time?

@PhilosophyOfJoel - //And the point of Wieland's reply was that it
refuted TO's article completely and demonstrated haemoglobin was
present - the thing that the TO article tried to refute. //

This is precisely why I was confused when you were claiming the opposite.

Also, Wieland's case that because the immunological response strongly suggested that it was intact hemoglobin is not as plausible as pointing out that it would have been hemoglobin fragments. He even makes this admission early on in the article, but then jumps from "remains" to "intact molecules". Remnants of a hemoglobin molecule do not equate with intact molecules, however.

//Secondly, the recent findings here demonstrate that haemoglobin is present.//

The recent findings deal with a duck-billed dinosaur, not the t-rex from earlier. So far, this looks like it's even better preserved than that -

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/05/01/apparent-discovery-of-dino-blood-may-finally-prove-the-tissue-preserves/

//On evidence that proteins and DNA cannot
last that long, there are a number of studies you can read up on. Like
I said, do you homework instead of just lifting stuff off TO website -
which is notorious for poorly documented articles.//

Translation: "I don't have the evidence to back it up, so instead of providing links like I did with the first article, I'll resort to insulting the debater's intelligence as a smoke-screen."

C'mon. You can do better than brush me off. Can you provide, at least, a starting point? (and poorly-documented? Do you mean as in they don't provide references?)

Dr. Menton's claims on C-14 dating are PRATT's. Eg:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD002.html (with sources written 4 years after Menton's article on radiometric dating)
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD001.html (same as above)

And you can have a look at the REFERENCES cited on each of those pages if you don't believe TO is being truthful.

As for Menton's work on RBC's - http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/04/dino-blood-redu.html - look about half-way down the page, shortly after the pictures from Schweitzer's work (the pics that look like blood cells and vessels).

//Tomas Lindahl did some research and testing
on this ins the late 70s and early 80s. His conclusion was that RBC,
Hemoglobin, etc could last more than 10k years under the best
conditions.//

Tomas Lindahl did his work exclusively on DNA. His conclusions were that at certain temperatures, fully hydrated DNA would not last more than several thousand years. Now while his work is fine, it doesn't apply to this situation because (1) so far, no DNA has been found, and (2) the fossil, while well preserved, did not experience the same preserving conditions as Lindahl's work did, so applying his work to this fossil is mismatching parameters.

//Lindal backpedaled a little after the initial
complaints/issues raised by evolutionsts, but the core findings were
very detrimental to the deep time scale on the strata.//

No, it didn't, since it was dealing with a very specific set of conditions. Even if it did, it would be no reason to overturn everything we know about fossil dating. We don't simply ignore all the evidence ALREADY pointing towards one conclusion just for the sake of one or two findings that appear to stand in opposition, and in this case, they don't even stand in opposition, since soft tissues aren't even used to date fossils in the first place. Again, there is no reason to assume that soft tissue = young age, since the level of degradation is not time-dependent as much as it is environment-dependent. Occam's Razor also applies here.

As for Sean Pittman's article -

His reference to the magnolia evokes my same point about preservation. Sure, it appears unlikely, but unless we know the details about the exact conditions around which the DNA was preserved, and assuming that the DNA is from that creature in the first place, there are many different scenarios possible.

His reference to bacterial cytospores/endospores is old news. Bacteria commonly enter that stage in times of duress, and have been known to bring their metabolic activities to a standstill while in this state. Couple that with a hospitable external environment, the solid outer shell (which provides a stable, homeostatic environment) and the bacteria are effectively "immortal". The fact that their DNA closely matched the DNA of modern bacteria is also old news - under optimal natural selection pressures, one would expect phenotypic changes to be minimal, if any at all. That's the reason why crocodiles, cockroaches, sharks and horseshoe crabs, for example, have changed very little over the millions of years. It's a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology, so why it's a shocker to him, I don't see.

Pitman also makes the mistaken assumption that contamination could not have occurred since the testing was done in a lab setting. Of course, this ignores the possibility that contamination could not have occurred before the material was even brought to the lab, or even dug up. But in the case of the bacteria, it's perfectly reasonable to assume they could survive for so long, given the conditions of their environment and the nature of bacterial endospores.

Pitman's remainder is much like the rest of CW's claims. I do like his notion that the heme molecule must be larger to elicit an immunological response, and I think it's the best argument in favor of saying that the heme molecules (if they are heme molecules from the t-rex) are better preserved. However, I think his estimates for <1000 da being non-immunogenic are a bit conservative (even so, he places the as-reported heme molecule above this boundary... on the other hand, he dismisses it as "unlikely" that it would produce a specific response, without going into details as to the solution used and the concentration of the heme in question). However, I think his claims regarding the fragments forming a new
molecule as being "unlikely" are without merit (much of his article is spent on appeals to incredulity), but time will tell.

Now there's still debate over some of the other work, like - http://newswise.com/articles/view/542898/

If Schweitzer's claims are supported, it only further supports the idea that paleontology's view of preserved tissue (which they often dismissed) must be reconsidered. Maybe it will cause a merger between molecular biology and paleontology in a more formal way than in the originally "unorthodox" ways in which Schweitzer used it (which I think were brilliant in discovering this tissue). However, as Schweitzer pointed out, I don't see this as revamping the dating methods, since the primary factor for preservation isn't time, but environmental conditions.