Do Fossils Last For Millions of Years

Do Fossils Last For Millions of Years ? Below is a transcript of a podcast by I.C.R. Research Scientist 
and Paleobiochemist Dr. Brian Thomas.
​Hello everyone welcome to The Creation Podcast  a show where we discuss science that confirms  
scripture I'm your host Ivana and my guest today  is Dr Brian Thomas ICR research scientist and  
paleobiochemist thank you for being here today Dr Thomas my pleasure of course, great well today we  
wanted to talk about maybe one of your favorite  subjects I hope and I imagine you know quite a  
bit about fossils but to start us off can you  just tell me what is a fossil a fossil is uh  
just the remains of a once living thing and so we  when we talk about fossil it could take a whole  
bunch of different forms uh it could be like a carbonized like impression where you where the  
organism got squished in mud and then baked and so everything that was organic turned into a thin  
film of carbon so you like have the outline of the creature so that's one type of fossil you have  
footprints that's another type of fossil and then what I was taught what a fossil is you have a bone  
and then the bone gets replaced by minerals so now you have a rock basically in the shape of the  
bone but all the original you know bone material  is supposed to be gone and what I've discovered  
in investigating fossils firsthand is that's not usually the case and so if you have a bone that's  
got um it's got some minerals in it the minerals came from the outside we call it permineralization  
where it fills the little pore spaces in the  bone of p-o-r-e these little gaps, it's partially  
mineralized per mineralized so that's another  form of fossil but there's a rare form it's I  
don't know how rare it is it's becoming less and less rare but the most interesting fossil to me is  
just leftover animal it's like a naturally mummified carcass.
  
So it hasn't been carbonized it hasn't been mineralized it's just a old bone it in the dirt in the 
ground and so what  we're finding is more and more examples of these  
and that's really interesting because it's made of the original animal and how can  
it be there still you know that's the question I'm trying to answer. Wow thank you that is very  
interesting and if I were or if you were to ask  the average scientist what kind of ages would you  
assign to these fossils ?. All scientists are trained to think in terms of the secular age and time  
scale which would be millions and tens of millions  and hundreds of millions of years depending on  
which layer of course the lowest layers that  have fossils in them would have the hundreds of  
millions of years age assignments attached to those layers and the fossils that are in them  
and and layers above that would be younger so tens of millions and then the uppermost layers  
uh younger as you ascend the the rock column  in any given location and generally that's  
that's that holds true the relative timing it's older in the bottom younger at the top but the  
absolute age assignments I've grown sceptical of those I really have I used to believe  
of course it's 100 million years old because  scientists have proven it and they use science  
to prove it and then and then later on I thought wait what science do they use and  
I started to investigate that and I found holes  in that and then after after I began to doubt  
the age assignments um based on how holy  the process was then I then I thought well  
wait a minute now there's positive evidence for recently deposited fossils in the form of these  
original biochemicals that are still in there  because they look young they look fresh yeah  
that's what really piques my interest with  these these fossils is the tissues in them not  
generally it's not whole tissues you know like a  I don't know like a chunk of liver or something  
it's still floppy that's not what we find in  the fossils it's really generally dried down  
real really crispy but it's original biochemistry  

you know you've got proteins and lipids and DNAs  
I guess sugars no one's done a lot of  looking specifically for sugars yet but  
they'll find it it's there so you mentioned that they're giving these age assignments and  
that you know it should start oldest obviously to youngest but um how do they get to those numbers  
can you explain that process so part of it has to  do with history so there's a historical precedent  
that we have to that we have to conform our our answers to and it started in the 1700s when um  
the majority of scientists decided yeah  we're going to go with this old earth view  
and then there were some dissenters back then  who said we don't think you guys have good  
science to back up this this you know eons right concept and it was philosophically driven it did  
not come from the data so at that even back then you know in the 1700s you had some scientists  
who really held sway and in other words  these were the guys who had control of  
the the top journals so they were the top editors.

and so they they would say well we're going to  
choose to highlight this article because it's got old earth in it and we're going to choose to not  
even publish that article because it mentions Noah's flood, and we want to get away from the  
flood why would a scientist be biased against  the flood and so that bias is really what I've  
found in my little history searches that I've done that drove the sort of the the rise to prominence  
in the scientific world of old earth you know and long age thinking that's a fun question to try to  
answer because scientists are people yeah and so  what do people do well we we uh we fill our minds  
with what we want to hear you know and we we build  we construct little worlds in our minds that fit  
the kind of world that we want to be in and if we don't want god in our world because we have sins  
right and if I have a sin and  god is like hey you have a sin.
  
You need to you need to repent of that sin and let me save you from that sin you know Jesus said  
it this way men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil and so maybe that's  
what's driving these scientists but anyway what we  have now is if I grew up as a scientist and I have  
to age date a certain fossil if I don't make it conform to what everyone else out there is saying  
then I'll be labeled not a real scientist you know I'll be I 'll be labelled a moron or an idiot  
and I'll be ostracized from my colleagues and I won't get any papers published and I won't get any  
funding so this is it's this whole is a practical side of it where you've got to have papers to get  
publications to get funding to put bread on your table right as a scientist but there's  
also a spiritual side that and both of these sides are pushing my secular colleagues anyway  
toward making sure that I conform  to the view of the old earth view.
 
What they've done since then is they've used  all kinds of um different age dating techniques  
none of which work, because there is no process  that happens today that could give us an age  
of an event in the past there's no process that can even do that you can measure decay rates
But you don't know the original conditions of what  was decaying into what how much of the original  
stuff was there in the beginning how much of  the decay product was there in the beginning you  
don't know and has the decay rate stayed constant  you don't know it has some more of that original  
material been injected into this into the sample  or the decay product been injected into or taken  
out of the sample so there's too many variables to  use any scientific process to determine an age uh  
it's not it's not a tool that science really has but everyone thinks it is everyone, and I used to  
also think that science determine that this is so many plus or minus 25  
million years old you know they give  age ranges but to make it look scientific. 
 
Anyway there's assumptions built in and no one  can fill in those assumptions and so what I've  
found is that the best way to to determine the age  of a thing is to look at historical evidence so is  
give a name and a likeness on a coin in an archaeological context yeah well that gives you a  
really tight age because you can take that name.  Caesar so and so and the likeness and you can  
compare it with actual historical records to build  a chronology for that and so what we find in the  
bible itself is a chronology for the whole world  and that's a historical record that is reliable  
much more reliable than guesses you can measure  isotope ratios in a rock but how do you turn  
isotope ratios into an age, well you have to  plug in the isotope ratios into a formula,  
and what does the formula have ? variables, remember variables  are represented by letters and so   
you solve the equation for the variable or whatever well these equations have variables  
and the variables are unknowns and it turns  out that in order to solve the equation to get  
to obtain a age estimate you have to fill in the  unknowns with guesses that's what's going on under  
the hood that a lot of people don't talk about  you mentioned earlier that scientists can find  
fossils with original tissues still within them so  having that original soft tissue doesn't that seem  
to deny the long ages you barely touched on that  earlier but could you shed more light on that what  
the implications of finding those soft tissues are  right so I just finished saying that you can't use  
any scientific decay process that we could measure  today could see it decaying whether it's isotopes  
decaying or tissues decaying you can't use that  to determine a specific age but you can get a clue  
as to the general life span or or shelf life  okay for that so there are age indicators they  
just don't give you a solid age date okay  well one of those indicators is what I'm  
what I wrote my thesis on right and that's  that's the proteins that are in there and so  
on the one hand we've done experiment after  experiment to verify and determine the  
decay rate of certain proteins and we know they're falling apart because  
chemistry happens. 

You can't keep chemistry from  happening. So what chemistry happens to proteins ?.  
So proteins fall apart because they're reacting  with water molecules they're reacting with oxygen  
molecules and and others and so this is a  relentless process and it turns a brand new  
freshly formed, let's say a collagen protein so the collagen is a protein that we find in our bones  
and in skin and connective tissue. 

Let's say you've  got a collagen molecule just freshly made and then  
the animal dies and what happens to that collagen  molecule?. well oxygen reacts with it, water reacts  
with it and then you end up with something less  than the original collagen molecule. And after  
a certain amount of time you end up with no collagen left. This stuff can last a long time  
it's what makes up a parchment and so the dead sea scrolls couple thousand years old.  
Those are made of parchment fragments. 

why are  these fragments ? because the chemistry that's  
been going on since the 2000 years since they were chemistry happens. Chemistry happens 
yeah it can last a long time but it  doesn't. It doesn't last a million years,  
based on the measured decay rates so why do we  find these proteins in fossils that have age  
assignments of tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of years ?. The age assignments again  
in my experience come from the secular constructs. They cherry pick numbers that fit the belief so  
it's a belief-driven process this age-dating thing. And so yeah, my field of paleo biochemistry paleo  
bio paleo means old, bio means life chemistry means  chemicals, so these are the old remnants of the  
chemicals of life like collagen, like proteins. 

So that's what I'm interested in really is  
how long can this stuff last, and the answer that we're getting over and over is it can't last even  
a million years at reasonable temperatures. So this  is a decay process that is temperature dependent  
unlike radioisotope decay okay, it just decays at the same rate at any temperature, but that's  
why we have refrigerators right. So you you  put your food in the fridge so that you will  
slow the rate of chemical reactions. It can last  thousands of years, but not a million, and so  
it looks to me based on the fact that we have biochemicals from the original animals, that  
made them in fossils from the very bottom of the rock, record also fossils at the very top  
and fossils in between the whole rock record.  

It looks like the whole rock you know, stack the  
pancake stack of rocks that we're all standing on were all deposited relatively recently, and  
you know that fits, it fits the model that we  have from the bible about Noah's flood happening  
recently and we're interpreting these rock layers as all having been most of them having been  
deposited in one year. So within a short time span, recently, it's totally crazy to the secular mind  
but it fits the data, 

So Dr Thomas can you tell  us what about the objection that these original  
biochemical fossils could just be contaminants ? Oh right that was a popular theory for a while. 
The people who raised that objection seem  to think that there's only one sample you  
know, and someone dropped their lunch in the test tube there or something. But we don't have just  
one sample we have literature in scientific technical literature going back to the 1960s.  
And we've actually compiled the literature on this, so we have example after example, it's from  
all the different continents except one. And it's from all the different rock layers except two  
and there's 117 papers compiled on our big list so far. And that's a fall 2021. and  
by the way it's dozens of different taxa so if  not just dinosaur, I mean it's in a turtle shell.
 
You've got actual skin in bird you've got  bird feathers you've got swimming creatures,  
remnants of internal organs in sea creatures. It's in clam shells.  
you know there's protein inside the clam  shell, so how are you going to contaminate  
a world worth. You can contaminate the whole  world, so that's that's kind of what I answer  
the objection of contamination by just listing  the over 100 technical literature examples. 

Can you just go a little bit further into explaining  how the existence of soft tissues can be expected,  
especially for Christians ? When we're trying  to combat what we've heard all our lives  
but we claim to be believers and we believe in scripture, so can you just help us make sure we  
differentiate why we would believe one or the  other so the bible is very clear.
 
Starting with creation week these are days they're  normal every every day days they're ordinary days  
and they're defined that way. Day one is defined as morning, and evenings, that's this transition  
of cycling from light to darkness, this is a day then you have six of those days  
the first three had no sun to mark them. We don't know what marked them but that's okay. Then the  
third, three had a sun to mark those three days, and we've had the sun not as the definer of a  
day, but the administrator ever since. Then okay, so  now we have days, that's how we mark time six days  
creation that's what the bible teaches not just  in genesis 1 but in the 10 commandments written  
in God's hand a couple thousand years after creation on a stone tablet given to Moses. 
You know for in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea and everything that's in them.  
And the seventh day he rested. 

What context is that ? Well this is why I want you to take a  
Sabbath day. This is the commandment. Take a Sabbath  day of rest, to remember your Creator and we do.  
This work week, we still do it today. It came from that. There's no you know astronomical  
precedent that defines our work week.  The seven day work week just comes from  
God's ten commandments and he built it into the way our societies function. 



So how do soft tissue or or biochemicals  original biochemicals is how I would phrase it  
in fossils. How do they fit that view ? The flood 4,400 or so years ago. 
You can have tissues last 4,400 years maybe in scratches and remnants and scraps of them  
why do we know that ? because the dead sea scrolls,  they're still around after 2000 years and that's  
just skin what about locked inside bone, protected,  even better maybe and we know the decay  
rates so you measure the decay rates so you can  have remnants last for, in theory tens of thousands  
of years actually. So we would expect to see some  scraps and remnants if bacteria don't get to them. 
If bacteria get there as all bets are off  and they eat it up, it's gobbled and gone. 
So by having a recent creation by having a recent flood thousands not millions of  
years ago that's what the Bible presents. That fits the data that we're seeing in all these  
original biochemicals that are throughout the  fossil record on every continent except Australia  
but I mean it's worldwide it's like there was a giant worldwide deposition event. 

Where have I heard that,  worldwide yeah so like Dr Clary here says it  
takes a worldwide cause to produce a worldwide  effect so we have a worldwide effect and that is  
young looking biochemicals in fossils. Some of these are still smelly you know you pull  
them out of the ground. What's that smell ? well it's still rotting your ground because it was  
deposited recently that's a good way to explain  it and that happens to fit what the bible says  
about the history of the world, and so as Christians what do we do, we say okay the bible  
got it right, yeah the bible does explain where we came from. The bible does explain why we have these  
rock layers known as flood and why these rock  layers look recently deposited, stinky flood layers.  

You can put it that way and so if  the bible got that right then and I  
as a Christian have more confidence than ever  that anything else the bible says I can trust. 
Now this is the word of God and that what that  means is if we're going to come to the bible as  
Christians and say well this part of the bible  is right but that part of the bible is wrong  
then what I'm saying is the part that's wrong  supposedly God's responsible for the bible and  
since God is since God wrote the wrong part  then God must have made a mistake so we need  
to get our act together as Christians and kind  of go through, are you sure that part's wrong.  
Are you sure you want to cast blame on God who is perfect you know. So there's a theological yeah  
and then then this is where I was actually, so I'm speaking from experience and saying. 
When I looked at these parts of the bible that I  didn't that didn't agree with my secular thinking  
like recent creation for example, I'd go well that part can't be right but that means  
God can't be trusted and it comes down to who am I going to trust. Whose word am I going to trust.  

And so and I can trust a little bit of God it's  like I'm tiptoeing toward God but what we're  
saying here at the institute is there's scientific  evidence to support all of it, the whole Bible. God  
made zero mistakes, he doesn't make mistakes. And so the science does support that scripture  
the science of original biochemistry supports  the scripture that talks about recent creation.  
To me that's very encouraging and I'm just  hoping that our audience would be able to  
process all that information in light of what  you shared, as far as you know really looking at  
what is driving the interpretation of the data. And then of course just not forgetting to trust  
scripture because we weren't there when the  dinosaurs were buried or made but there was  
someone who was, and he left us his information in the Bible. 

So just being able to align all of that  
together so thank you so much for sharing and just  so that our viewers and listeners would know that  
we have your thesis that you mentioned we actually  sell it as a resource and so this would give you  
more of that information it's ancient and fossil  bone collagen remnants and so you'll be able to  
find that on our website https://www.icr.org/ or if you're over here  in person at our discovery center but thank you  
so much for sharing that with us Dr Thomas and I  guess we can say the proof is in the fossils maybe  
you should make that also a t-shirt but to all of  our viewers and listeners thank you for joining us  
you can find this podcast on YouTube or  anywhere else you might find your podcast  
don't forget to subscribe for future episodes and  leave us a rating and review so that others can  
know about us and if you had any additional  questions like Dr Thomas mentioned we can't  
elaborate on everything in this one episode but  send us a message on social media if you'd like to  
know more about something but I'm Ivana and we'll, see you guys next time on the Creation Podcast.