Letter: Expert's concern at creationist message
Creationists have ignored geological and radiometric data to claim that the discovery of fragments of biological materials extracted from dinosaur bone "proves" that man and dinosaurs lived together.
They simply don't think haemoglobin and bone protein can survive millions of years, so are prepared to ignore the independent results of geology and chemistry.
One such is David Burton ("Debate on dinosaurs", March 14) who quotes extensively from an article by an agricultural scientist, David Catchpoole, whose expertise is in "forage tree legumes". Catchpoole argues that dinosaurs are contemporary with humans despite their fossils never having been found together.
Burton claims to quote Mary Schweitzer saying she had trouble getting her work published. However I soon found around 50 peer reviewed papers by her and a number of magazine articles.
Mary Schweitzer is a professional palaeontologist whose papers detail her findings of soft tissue in dinosaur bone. In an article published in Biologos in 2014 she says "One thing that does bother me, though, is that young earth creationists take my research and use it for their own message, and I think they are misleading people about it."
If creationists want to dispute the age of dinosaur fossils they need to find better evidence than the presence or absence of organic tissues in 68 million year old bones.
AC Mitchell, Madeley
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