Why do we only find fossils?

Good info. randman, but it's not the same thing as what we see in La Brea. While fosilized bones may still contain traces of their past, the La Brea bones are pretty much fully preserved.In any case, we don't find any dinos in the tar pit, nor have we ever found a dino bone that hasn't been substantualy mineralized.The point is, if dinos lived only 6000 years ago we should have at least some skeletal specimins of the quality found in La Brea, if not skeletons in the tar pit as well.This message has been edited by Yaro, 11-09-2005 10:10 PM

The fossilization at La Brea did not work as descrbed a this website. I belive the site is asuming some sort of permineralization which is not the case with the tarpit. From the labrea home page the process is described like this:
http://www.tarpits.org/education/guide/geology/fossil.html from another section: http://www.tarpits.org/education/guide/geology/fcondit.html Acording to the site an animal may have been exposed for a matter of weaks or years before finaly being coevered over. Indeed that seems consistent with the data in the OP concerning bone decay.Bone, in even moist/humid climate, may take as many as a dozen years to decompose 100%. So rapid buirial doesn't have to be so... rapid... This message has been edited by Yaro, 11-09-2005 10:21 PM

Yaro, the simple answer could also be that dinosaurs lived, but not in sufficient numbers and not in that specific locale.It may indicate YECism is wrong, but it doesn't exclude the chance some dinosaurs didn't go extinct.

Hi, Yaro, how many in your list are extinct? The point I make is, forget the dinosaurs, concentrate on the named species that have disappeared. If La Brea is post-Flood(as Yecs might be tempted to say), and escaped being buried under thousands of feet of sediments, how come the saber-tooths, etc. aren`t wandering around today? Did the 'intelligent designer' slip up again?

Besides your misreprsentation of the finding of "blood" and "soft tissues" in fossils, you should actually learn to look for the peer reviewed literature on ancient tissue preservation before putting your little ignorant fingers to the keyboard...Plants
Koller B, Schmitt JM, Tischendorf G. Related Articles, Links
Cellular fine structures and histochemical reactions in the tissue of a cypress twig preserved in Baltic amber.
Proc Biol Sci. 2005 Jan 22;272(1559):121-6.insects:
Poinar HN, Hoss M, Bada JL, Paabo S. Related Articles, Links
Amino acid racemization and the preservation of ancient DNA.
Science. 1996 May 10;272(5263):864-6.much more recent: mammoths...note, in samples only thousands of years old almost all proteins are degraded, highly modified, and lacking almost all of the elements contained in living tissueLowenstein JM. Related Articles, Links
Immunological reactions from fossil material.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1981 May 8;292(1057):143-9.Prager EM, Wilson AC, Lowenstein JM, Sarich VM. Related Articles, Links
Mammoth albumin.
Science. 1980 Jul 11;209(4453):287-9.Here is another dinosaur and note (if you read it..but you won't) that tissue preservation means fine structure..it is completely fossilizedChin K, Eberth DA, Schweitzer MH, Rando TA, Sloboda WJ, Horner JR. Related Articles, Links
Remarkable preservation of undigested muscle tissue within a Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurid coprolite from Alberta, Canada.
Palaios. 2003 Jun;18(3):286-94.Another method for evaluating preservation of tissuesProc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1999 Jul 20;96(15):8426-31. Related Articles, LinksProtein preservation and DNA retrieval from ancient tissues.Poinar HN, Stankiewicz BA.Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Inselstrasse 22, Leipzig D-04103, Germany. poinar@eva.mpg.deThe retrieval of DNA from fossils remains controversial. To substantiate claims of DNA recovery, one needs additional information on the preservation of other molecules within the same sample. Flash pyrolysis with GC and MS was used to assess the quality of protein preservation in 11 archaeological and paleontological remains, some of which have yielded ancient DNA sequences authenticated via a number of criteria and some of which have consistently failed to yield any meaningful DNA. Several samples, including the Neanderthal-type specimen from which DNA sequences were recently reported, yielded abundant pyrolysis products assigned to 2,5-diketopiperazines of proline-containing dipeptides. The relative amounts of these products provide a good index of the amount of peptide hydrolysis and DNA preservation. Of these samples, four stem from arctic or subarctic regions, emphasizing the importance of cooler temperatures for the preservation of macromolecules. Flash pyrolysis with GC and MS offers a rapid and effective method for assessing fossils for the possibility of DNA preservation.This is all the tip of the ice berg and you could have found it easily yourself i

A very good point!It seems to me La Brea is air tight evidence against the YEC possition. Any way you slice it, it's contents are anomalus by YEC standards.

Ah! But you see, there is the rub. Dinosaurs were litteraly everywhere! And california and the rest of the southwest contain huge fossil beds of dinos. There is no reason to assume that such a group as diverse and large as dinosaurs would not be represented by at least one member.It would be like having a tarpit today, yet it has failed to capture any member of the rodent family. And dinos, as a whole, were more plentifull than rodents. They were everywhere! Yet somehow, every extant species, somehow avoided to get stuck in the tar?Heck, what about pre-ice age insects, reptiles, mammals, and other crits we know about. How come they aren't represented? It seems like La Brea is a well defined time capsule which describes the ecosystem of an age long past, and that age is over 72,005 years ago.Strangely to YEC's, that ecosystem features no dinos, or other fauna which pre-exited the ice age. I agree. I just have not seen any dinos wandering around lately, though it would be really cool if we found a group of long lost dinos.I don't think it's an impossibility.

What seems to me to be missing in the discussion to-date is the state of bones found from the last few 1,000 years. These are what, in the YEC view, I would think all bones are supposed to be like.I've found some bones on the surface (deer, cattle, rodents, cat) that were almost certainly less the a decade old. They are the original bone (to my eye) but significantly weathered in many cases.Obviously these aren't really good comparison since I only found them because there were on the surface. I'm interested in bones, shells etc found in middens, tombs and the like.

Hi Ned,
A couple of the references I posted deal with this (i.e. the racemization papers, and the mammoth albumin study). If you look at bones that are recently buried to about 50 Kya, the determining factor in preservation is stable cold climate i.e. permafrost, or cold dry caves. The bones you find that have been exposed on the surface are faced with both enzymatic degradation (from bacteria and fungi) and hydrolytic damage to all of the biomolecules. All of these processes are slowed down when the samples are frozen (mammoths, permafrost finds) or in cold dry caves (sloths from chile, sloth coprolites from the US southwest).Bones found in tombs sometimes show preservation though with human remains it tends to be controversial (at the DNA level).But warm, wet climates or those with large variation in seasonal conditions, i.e. freeze thaw do not yield bones, etc. in a good preservation state.Ultimately, a 40 K old mammoth could be better preserved than someone buried in the tropics last year.One point in all of this is that none of what I am discussing here are fossils. The bones and soft tissues have not been replaced...when the ice thaws in Yakutia and a mammoth is exposed to the elements, it immediately starts to rot..given time it will waste away and disappear...not become a nice fossil skeleton that you will dig up millions of years from now.

Hey Ned, I've been pokeing around and turned up some interesting things.This are roman skeletos unearthed in an english settlment:http://www.lincsheritage.org/vt/ancaster/ancast2.html
http://www.lincsheritage.org/vt/ancaster/ancast1.htmlmain site: http://www.lincsheritage.org/vt/ancaster/c12.htmlthese skeletons are from AD 315 or so and are quite well preserved as you can see.Some skeletons circa 1235 AD were also unearthed elsewhere in england. They were very well preserved and I belive were ultimetly burried elsewhere in a christian cermony. BBC NEWS | UK | England | Medieval skeletons uncovered Here are some viking remains:BBC - History - Ancient History in depth: Viking Dig ReportsAs you can see from all of these examples, these bones are pretty recognizable as bone. Some are very well preserved such as the roman skeleton. Would it not be concivable then to say at least some dinos should be cropping up in the same condition?

I thought EVERY creature got onto the arc? I know seven of every clean animal got on, but I was under the impression that two of every other species got on. What does the Bible say about this?

It's a start but no real detail on the nature of the fossils. Mammuthus' reference is on the right track.It appears that for most cases the permineralization is rather slow or doesn't happen. There are special cases where it is quick.What we seem to have is this:
1) There are many bones of various sorts that are less than a few 1,000 years old and are NOT mineralized at all.
2) There are many bones of many different animals (dinos etc.) and ALL of them are mostly or completely mineralized.YEC'ers have not supplied an explanation for this that I am aware of.

I think that the problem is one cannot extrapolate from bones and soft tissues found today in sediments to what will become a fossil. Mammoth bones are found all over Russia and many countries of the former soviet union..but not mammoth fossils. They might be called fossils but this is in principle a misnomer...King Tut's skeleton is not a fossil either. I don't know that permafrost is necessarily conducive to fossil formation.Animals, plants and insects in amber are a different issue. It is still unclear what they are. The DNA data is a wash i.e. not reproducible and likely all contamination. But some of the amino acid racemization work suggests 1) there are still proteins present in some inclusions 2) the proteins are not completely racemized i.e. fairly well preserved. In that case, they are not fossils either.A completely mineralized bone that is now a rock in the shape of a dinosaur leg is a fossil. A rock with the imprint of soft tissue is a fossil.

I don't think that is the point of this thread.What is the point is that for a large variety of animals, all over the world we only find them as fossils, heavily permineralized (and therefore on your borderline between fossil and not) or preserved under very special circumstances (in amber for example). We find none of them as simply "old" bones.

You are probably right and I am off topic. I jumped in to counter randman's false assertion that there is not peer reviewed work on fossil and subfossil chemistry when in fact, they are active fields of research.But yes, even for mammoths, you only find bones dating back up to about 100 K but for more primitive mammoth groups, like Mammuthus meridionalis, which lived millions of years ago, you only find fossils...not compatible with global floods, YECism, creationism, IDism or any other such nonsense.