Published Sept 18, 2019 Updated 09/2026
In 1961, petroleum geologist Robert Liscomb discovered dinosaur bones along the Colville River on Alaska’s North Slope. Because the bones showed remarkably little alteration, their dinosaurian identity was not immediately recognized partly because no one thought any dinosaur bone would be unpermineralized for tens of millions of years. However, later studies identified that the remains were indeed from duck-billed dinosaurs (along with other dinosaurs) within these deposits.¹
In 1987, paleontologist Kyle Davies published a description of duck-billed dinosaur remains from Alaska’s North Slope. He emphasized their unusual preservation: “The quality of preservation is remarkable. The bones are stained a dark red brown but otherwise display little permineralization, crushing, or distortion.”²
That observation is important. Permineralization occurs when mineral-rich water enters the pores and cavities of buried bone and deposits minerals within them. Yet these dinosaur bones exhibited comparatively little evidence of that process.
Some accounts of the Alaskan discoveries have gone further, describing the specimens as frozen or “fresh” dinosaur bone and reporting what appeared to be preserved marrow within the bones.³ If confirmed, preserved marrow would make the specimens even more remarkable but this should, as of now, be regarded as inconclusive. The peer-reviewed papers cited here establish the unusually low degree of permineralization in many of the bones, but they do not establish through biochemical or microscopic analysis that original dinosaur bone marrow has survived.
Therefore, the distinction is important: remarkably unpermineralized dinosaur bone is documented; preserved original marrow has been reported but has not been conclusively demonstrated.
Nearly thirty years later, researchers studying the Liscomb Bonebed in northern Alaska described another collection of hadrosaur remains:
“The hadrosaurid remains are almost entirely disarticulated, show little evidence of weathering, predation, or trampling, and are typically uncrushed and unpermineralized.”⁴
This statement appeared not in creationist literature, but in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
The description generated disagreement among paleontologists concerning the extent of mineral alteration in these bones. In a subsequent reply, Mori and his colleagues acknowledged that some specimens exhibited permineralization but maintained that this occurred in only a relatively small portion of the material:
“We are aware that some bones in the Liscomb Bonebed exhibit this type of preservation, but maintain that it occurs in a surprisingly small, currently unquantified percentage of bones.”⁵
Therefore, it would be inaccurate to claim that none of the Alaskan dinosaur bones show mineral alteration. However, it is equally inaccurate to dismiss the original observation: researchers themselves have repeatedly described many of these dinosaur bones as exhibiting remarkably little permineralization.
Not necessarily. Mainstream paleontology does not determine the age of a bone simply by measuring how completely it has been mineralized. Mineralization depends upon burial conditions, groundwater chemistry, sediment, temperature, and other environmental factors. Consequently, conventional paleontologists argue that poorly permineralized bone can arguably still be very ancient.⁶ But the bottomline is bones are not fossils.
That distinction should be understood.
However, it also raises an important question. If these bones really are approximately 70 million years old, how did portions of the original bone remain so remarkably unaltered for such an enormous period of time?
Calling something a “fossil” does not answer that question. Nor does the word fossilized necessarily mean that the original biological material has been completely replaced by stone.
The empirical observation remains striking: dinosaur bones assigned an age of tens of millions of years have been recovered with remarkably little permineralization, crushing, distortion, or weathering.
From a young-earth creationist perspective, such exceptional preservation is exactly the kind of evidence that deserves careful examination rather than being dismissed simply because the surrounding geological framework assigns the bones an ancient age.
Sources
- William A. Clemens, “Ancient Dinosaurs from Alaska’s North Slope,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, Vol. 13, No. 4 / Vol. 14, No. 1, 1993–1994.
- Kyle L. Davies, “Duck-bill Dinosaurs (Hadrosauridae, Ornithischia) from the North Slope of Alaska,” Journal of Paleontology, Vol. 61, No. 1 (1987), pp. 198–200.
- Margaret Helder, “Fresh Dinosaur Bones Found,” Creation Ex Nihilo, Vol. 14 (1992), p. 16. This source reports apparently fresh or frozen dinosaur bone and marrow; the identification of original dinosaur marrow has not been independently established by the peer-reviewed studies cited here.
- Hirotsugu Mori, Patrick S. Druckenmiller, and Gregory M. Erickson, “A New Arctic Hadrosaurid from the Prince Creek Formation (Lower Maastrichtian) of Northern Alaska,” Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2016), pp. 15–32. Published online September 22, 2015. DOI: 10.4202/app.00152.2015.
- Hirotsugu Mori et al., “Preservation of Arctic Dinosaur Remains from the Prince Creek Formation (Alaska, USA): A Reply to Fiorillo (2016),” Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2016), p. 174.
- Permineralization is highly dependent upon the chemical and geological environment surrounding buried remains. The degree of mineralization therefore cannot, by itself, establish the age of a fossil. Journal of Paleontology; 61, 1987; (pp. 198-200.)
