Well, Kevin, what did you find then when you were looking at the sample and you actually
found some tissue?
Okay, here's what we found.
Here we have a piece of the horn that has been decalcified, like what I just showed
you over on the bench.
Mark Armitage was our microscopist working on this.
Mark then took a piece of the decalcified horn and put it under a microscope.
See the fibrous material there, that's part of the composition of the bone matrix itself.
But what's really of interest is see the white material here on the surface swaying back
and forth, that's actual dinosaur tissue on the surface.
See this is not a solid fossil, this has got tissue characteristic to it.
See notice how it flexes back, that's of course very interesting how you pull on it, flexes
back, pull on it, flexes back.
That's characteristic of tissue, that's what tissue would do.
Now Mark then was able to extract some very thin layers of elastic material away from
the inner core of the horn.
But he didn't have to decalcify the horn in order to do this.
You can see it's stretchy, it's flexible, in fact look, notice see how it's stretching,
it's stretching almost twice its original size of what it was.
See this again is original dinosaur tissue that he's peeled directly from the fossil.
There was no decalcification that he did first.
See this is how accessible this tissue was, he didn't have to remove any fossilized bone
to get to this tissue.
Okay now here is a light microscope picture of the tissue itself.
You can see the texture of it and in fact see notice the arrows, they're pointing to
cells, these cells specifically what we call osteocytes.
Those are bone cells, they're involved in making bone because even though we think a
bone is a rock, bone is tissue, bone is not a rock.
In fact in our bodies, bone is replaced about every 10 years to keep it all fresh and the
new matrix laid down and such.
So it's it's constantly being changed and that's what those cells do.
And if you look at them then at a closer magnification, well we see then this is using
scanning electron microscopy.
You see the extreme detail of the cells.
See how well that's preserved.
It is.
I mean that doesn't speak for something that has been degrading or something that is just
been in a non-pristine condition for 65, 70 million years.
We would not expect, begin to expect to see such enormous and elaborate detail.
I mean these structures are incredibly small.
You know this is our 20 micron bar here.
See how small these structures are still intact and yet see that kind of detail then obviously
the preservation process is surprising really to everybody.
But I think as creationists we have a lot less to explain than someone trying to suggest
that this is you know 65, 70 million years of age.