The Protein That Should Not Be There

• J. Tan

  Author

• M. Nailor

  Author

Collagen is the most abundant protein in bone, and like all proteins it decays through measurable chemical reactions whose rates can be determined experimentally and projected with the Arrhenius equation. In 2024 a team from the University of Liverpool and UCLA reported endogenous collagen in the sacrum of an Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur excavated from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, a setting conventionally dated to roughly 66 million years. They sequenced six collagen peptides matching the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus, quantified hydroxyproline, and documented birefringence consistent with intact collagen-bioapatite structure. We take their result at face value, the collagen is real and original, and ask the obvious question their paper does not: can original collagen survive 66 million years at this burial? Using experimentally measured collagen half-lives, including the figure of 21,012 years at 15 degrees Celsius obtained by one of that paper's own co-authors, we show that even under ideal dry conditions collagen falls below one percent of its original content within about 140,000 years, and cannot persist even one million years, let alone sixty-six. The Hell Creek setting is not ideal for preservation, the temperate and wet conditions accelerate hydrolytic decay. Survival to 66 million years would require retaining a fraction of roughly ten to the negative nine hundred forty-sixth power, a quantity so far below a single molecule that it has no physical meaning. The kinetics are incompatible with the assigned age by hundreds of times even at the most generous limit, and instead point to a burial of thousands of years, consistent with a recent, post-Flood timescale.

1. J. Tan

   Jeremy Tan went to Mater Carmeli School for ALS and the Philippine Cultural College. He studied computer science during his school days. For decades he studied astronomy, geology, genetics, and World War II history. Jeremy is also the Chief Editor and Publisher of the TIR peer-reviewed research journal team, assists at CGC Ministries, and part of the Thermomix family. He also loves to collect high quality toys. 

2. M. Nailor

   Sindonologist and gerontologist specializing in the biology of aging and disease, Matt Nailor holds a Doctor of Divinity. His research focuses on the evolutionary theory of aging, which accounts for senescence through mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy, and disposable soma theory. This work engages origins science, with particular attention to molecular aging, mutation rates and accumulation, biological evolution, genetic variation, and historical linguistics.

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