The Stench from Hell Creek: How an Evangelical Christian Woman Shook Up the Scientific Community with a Surprising Dinosaur Find
by Jeff Lindsay
The Book of Mormon warns against some of the many fallacies made by the elite and educated
ranks who find many reasons to mock religion and deny Jesus Christ (e.g., 2 Nephi 9:28-29).
One of the great ironies in science is the ease with which scientists and educated thinkers stop
thinking once they think they have something figured out. Don't be shocked: they are human too.
In spite of all that education, they can readily fall into the trap of clinging to old paradigms,
proudly thinking they now know something for themselves, when real science should take the
humble attitude of recognizing that it is tentative and that numerous untested assumptions
sometimes go into the mental models we create when we interpret data.
This vulnerability is especially great when we make judgments about things that are not simply
straightforward matters like how much something weighs. When science is applied to resolve
moral issues or matters of faith, for example, look out. It is an inadequate tool for some purposes.
One interesting illustration of the problems in blindly relying on "established" scientific
knowledge involves the recent discovery that soft matter -- cartilage, skin, muscle tissue, and so
on -- may have been preserved in some actual dinosaur finds. Sounds crazy, right?
Dinosaurs are millions of years old, and obviously soft tissue could not possibly last that long so
it's just not possible. Dinosaurs are fossils. Rocks. After millions of years, nothing else but
fossilized rock can remain.
Science has spoken, and as we all should know, when science has spoken, the debate and the
thinking are done.
At least that's how some scientists apparently responded when Mary Higby Schweitzer, a woman
and a known evangelical Christian, of all things, dared to claim that she had solid evidence for
soft tissue from ancient dinosaurs.
The woman is Mary Higby Schweitzer and her story is ably told by Barry Yeoman in
"Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery," Discover Magazine, April 2006.
Schweitzer gazed through a microscope in her laboratory at North Carolina State
University and saw lifelike tissue that had no business inhabiting a fossilized dinosaur
skeleton: fibrous matrix, stretchy like a wet scab on human skin; what appeared to be
supple bone cells, their three-dimensional shapes intact; and translucent blood vessels
that looked as if they could have come straight from an ostrich at the zoo.
By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from
the bones. It's a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a
few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T. rex walked what's now the Hell
Creek Formation in Montana.
But Schweitzer tends to ignore such dogma. She just looks and wonders, pokes and
prods, following her scientific curiosity. That has allowed her to see things other
paleontologists have missed -- and potentially to shatter fundamental assumptions about
how much we can learn from the past.
If biological tissue can last through the fossilization process, it could open a window
through time, showing not just how extinct animals evolved but how they lived each day.
This is a huge advance. What breathtaking finds are waiting to be revealed in the soft tissue and
perhaps even the DNA of these ancient kings and queens of the planet? Hurray for Mary Higby
Schweitzer and for her unusual background and her faith that helped her see things other
scientists have probably been missing (and accidentally destroying) for decades.
Mary is an evangelical Christian, but also accepts that the earth may be billions of years old (that
fits my understanding of the evidence as well). There are other things about her I really like:
In 1989, while dividing her time between substitute teaching and her three children,
Schweitzer steered back toward her childhood fascination with dinosaurs. She
approached Jack Horner, a renowned dinosaur scientist, and asked if she could audit his
vertebrate paleontology course at Montana State University.
He appreciated her refreshingly nontraditional mind. "She really wasn't much of a
scientist -- which is good," says Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the
Rockies. "Scientists all get to thinking alike, and it's good to bring people in from
different disciplines. They ask questions very differently."
Schweitzer's first forays into paleontology were "a total hook," she says. Not only was she
fascinated by the science, but to her, digging into ancient strata seemed like reading the
history of God's handiwork.
Schweitzer worships at two churches -- an evangelical church in Montana and a
nondenominational one when she is back home in North Carolina -- and when she talks
about her faith, her bristly demeanor falls away.
"God is so multidimensional," she says. "I see a sense of humor. I see His compassion in
the world around me. It makes me curious, because the creator is revealed in the
creation."
Unlike many creationists, she finds the notion of a world evolving over billions of years
theologically exhilarating: "That makes God a lot bigger than thinking of Him as a
magician that pulled everything out in one fell swoop."
Schweitzer's career began just as paleontologists started framing their own questions in
more multidimensional ways. Until the 1980s, researchers were more likely to be trained
in earth science than in biology.
They often treated fossils as geologic specimens -- mineral structures whose main value
lay in showing the skeletal shapes of prehistoric animals. A younger generation of
paleontologists, in contrast, has focused on reconstructing intimate details like growth
rates and behaviors using modern techniques normally associated with the study of living
organisms....
This shifting perspective clicked with Schweitzer's intuitions that dinosaur remains were
more than chunks of stone. Once, when she was working with a T. Rex skeleton
harvested from Hell Creek, she noticed that the fossil exuded a distinctly organic odor.
"It smelled just like one of the cadavers we had in the lab who had been treated with
chemotherapy before he died," she says.
Given the conventional wisdom that such fossils were made up entirely of minerals,
Schweitzer was anxious when mentioning this to Horner. "But he said, 'Oh, yeah, all Hell
Creek bones smell,'" she says.
To most old-line paleontologists, the smell of death didn't even register. To Schweitzer, it
meant that traces of life might still cling to those bones.
Wow, right under their noses! Dinosaur finds at that site were well known to smell like cadavers.
Dozens of soft tissue treasures had probably been destroyed over the years, with a treasure of
information right under the offended noses of scientists.
It took someone with a different perspective to dig into what was really there and reveal
something tantalizing. Thank you, Mary Higby Schweitzer!
I also love her approach to science as something that teaches us more about the handiwork and,
yes, humor of God. It is exhilarating.
While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, researcher Mark Armitage
discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site,
according to attorney Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute.
Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus
says Armitage was "fascinated" to find soft tissue on the sample -- a discovery Bacus
said stunned members of the school's biology department and even some students
"because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past
rather than going extinct 60 million years ago."
"Since some creationists, like [Armitage], believe that the triceratops bones are only 4,000 years
old at most, [Armitage's] work vindicated his view that these dinosaurs roamed the planet
relatively recently,"according to the complaint (PDF) filed July 22 in Los Angeles Superior
Court.
The lawsuit against the CSUN board of trustees cites discrimination for perceived religious
views.
According to court documents, shortly after the original soft tissue discovery, a CSUN official
told Armitage, "We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!"
Armitage, a published scientist of over 30 years, was subsequently let go after CSUN abruptly
claimed his appointment at the university of 38 months had been temporary, and claimed a lack
of funding for his position, according to attorneys.
Perhaps the problem may have been that he wasn't quiet about how this discovery supposedly
supported his personal young-earth views. If his claims are correct, it was unfortunate and not a
very scientific thing for the university to do.
Not surprisingly, scientists and university leaders are humans like everyone else and bring plenty
of biases with them in their quest for truth and funding. Sadly, some university systems have
become remarkably intolerant of diverging views and enforce uniformity of thought much more
than they let on in their P.R. Some pretty extreme abuses happen from time to time.
I'm glad Mary Schweitzer's work was able to move forward and shake things up for the good of
all of us.
By the way, other scientists think they have an answer for how soft tissue could be preserved so
long. Turns out iron nanoparticles might be doing the trick. They seem to have done well in
preserving soft tissue during a two-year period already. Just another 50 million years or so before
we'll be sure.
Related info:
FAIRMormons post on dinosaurs reminds us to be cautious when we try to draw
unintended scientific conclusions from the scriptures.
Jeff Lindsay has been defending the Church on the Internet since 1994, when he launched his
LDSFAQ website under JeffLindsay.com. He has also long been blogging about LDS matters on
the blog Mormanity (mormanity.blogspot.com). Jeff is a longtime resident of Appleton,
Wisconsin, who recently moved to Shanghai, China, with his wife, Kendra.
He works for an Asian corporation as head of intellectual property. Jeff and Kendra are the parents of 4 boys, 3 married and the the youngest on a mission.
He is a former innovation and IP consultant, a former professor, and former Corporate Patent
Strategist and Senior Research Fellow for a multinational corporation.
Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins and Mukund Karanjikar are authors of the book Conquering
Innovation Fatigue (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and is a registered US
patent agent. He has more than 100 granted US patents and is author of numerous publications.
Jeff's hobbies include photography, amateur magic, writing, and Mandarin Chinese.