Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart shares news items from the latest Creation magazine including one on unfossilized dinosaur tissue that turns out to be incorrect. (See below for the widely used ambiguous terminology that sometimes misleads science reporters and bloggers into presuming that the discovery of dinosaur "soft tissue" means original biological material, when often, what the term refers to is permineralized soft tissue, i.e., stone that has taken the shape of the dead creature.) Other topics include Yosemite's El Capitan rockslide, NASA's Solar Probe, and a quasar growing ten times brighter, not over millions but in one year! And then there's the request that you help us find RSR's missing underwriter (see below). We need an underwriter (perhaps you!) to put our full Global Flood video on YouTube so it can be viewed freely by a wider audience. Doing so will mean our sales of the video will end. So we are looking for a gift of $10,000 from an underwriter (that can be you!) to put this resource freely online and to bring us from $23,500 (updated on 9/30/17) to put us over our telethon goal of $30,000! Just call 1-800-8Enyart (83k6-9278) or email [email protected] or go to rsr.org and click on the store. Thank you for your consideration! * Example of Need to Clarify Paleontology Terminology: In the age of sequencing endogenous dinosaur proteins, etc., the customary use of "soft tissue" without further clarification to describe permineralized remains should be discontinued. As of 2018, the unqualified phrase "soft tissue" should refer to actual biological material with "permineralized soft tissue" or its equivalent being used when no endogenous material is indicated. A good general term to refer to a dinosaur (or other creature) that has endogenous still-biological material is to call it a "biomaterial fossil". Such ambiguity (though avoidable by a careful reading of the paper) led to confusion in an article, Soft Tissue in Fossil Dinosaur Brains, published in the current October 2017 issue of Creation magazine (Vol. 39, Num. 4) on page 7. (The editors plan to print a correction in the next edition.) That piece is based on the 2016 Geological Society of London Special Publication, Remarkable preservation of brain tissues in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur. Here's what the Creation article concluded from that paper: - "in 2016, researchers... reported not just fossilized brains, but unfossilized brain tissue" - this allegedly 133 million-year-old "fossil... was found to contain unfossilized protein fragments--brain tissue, fine capillaries, collagen structures, and the membrane that surrounds the brain." This is just the latest problem resulting from the ambiguity of "soft tissue" reports. To make matters worse, the GSL paper, as is common among paleontologists, refer to "blood vessels" and "collagen" when they actually mean permineralized vessels and collagen bands. However, the paper doesn't use terms, such as "unfossilized" and "protein fragments", that would have indicated a biomaterial fossil. * Diagnostic Terms that Indicate a Biomaterlal Fossil: By default, a scientific paper reporting on a "soft tissue" discovery will be referencing stone artefacts, i.e., permineralized skin and scale impressions, feathers, internal organs replaced with phosphates, carbonates, etc. Of course, nothing substitutes for reading a particular paper of interest. However, you can usually quickly rule out that a publication is referring only to permineralized fossils if contains a number of the following biomaterial diagnostic terms: - endogenous, endogeneity - molecule, molecular, chemistry - sub-cellular, cellular, cell, red blood cells - proteinaceous - fragments [not bone or carbonized wood, for example, but protein fragments] - protein [but not used as in "protein replacement by calcium phosphate", etc.] - sequence [as in the amino acid sequences in a protein, an RNA, or a double helix] - beta-keratin, tubulin, actin, tropomyo