A comparison of human bone, fossilized dinosaur bone, and Ed Conrad's putative Carboniferous bone

Ed Conrad has been arguing that he has found examples of fossilized human bones from the Carboniferous era. He has been trying to get proof positive of his assertion, the latest example being the tests performed by Andrew MacRae at the University of Calgary. Unfortunately, Ed was not pleased with the results of those tests, and voiced a number of complaints, one being that MacRae had made no direct comparison of the putative bone specimen with real human bone.

I offered Ed the opportunity to use my microscopy equipment to correct this supposed flaw in the testing. He and his friend Joe stopped by this weekend, the 13^th of July, to compare the specimen prepared by MacRae, a section of dinosaur bone that MacRae was nice enough to give to Ed, and a section of human long bone that we use in histology labs here in the biology department. We also looked at scrapings from both a piece of human bone and the specimen in question; unfortunately, we did not get images of those samples.

In an earlier version of this page, I did not try to interpret these images at all, because they are so blatantly obvious. However, Ed Conrad has recently made a number of false and vituperative comments on talk.origins, so I have added a section to address some of Ed's claims.

All three images were viewed on a Nikon Optiphot, with a 10x/NA 0.30 plan apochromatic objective (that simply means that the objective was corrected for both spherical and chromatic aberration, and had reasonably good resolution for a low power dry lens). The images were captured with a VideoScope CCD-200E camera, and digitized with a Perceptics PixelPipeline digitizer and a Mac Quadra 800, using custom software I've written. The final resolution of these images is about 1 micrometer/pixel. A 100 micrometer scale bar is also present in each image. For those of you who care about final magnification, the reduced images on this page correspond to very roughly 115x, if you are using a 75dpi monitor; clicking on the images will open up the original images at about 350x.

These images were photographed as Ed Conrad demanded in a posting to talk.origins a while back. Each was taken one after another with none of the parameters of the optics changed in any way, except to focus directly on the specimen.

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Human bone thin section

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Dinosaur bone thin section

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Thin section of Ed Conrad's specimen (EC96-001)

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Recent developments

Since I made these observations public, Ed Conrad has made a few comments in reply.

• My description of our visit, made on talk.origins
• One of Ed's replies to that description

The upshot of Ed's comments is that he disavows these observations, and disagrees strongly with the conclusion implied by these and Andrew MacRae's results, that his specimens are not fossilized bone. Here are Ed's chief arguments, as I interpret them:

Bone structure varies with the type of bone and position within the bone

Ed was very surprised to learn that bone does not have a uniform structure, although I personally mentioned this to him and it is common knowledge among biologists and informed laymen. Unfortunately, Ed has seized upon this simple fact to argue that 1) his specimen does look like bone, just not the kind of compact bone present on my slide, and 2) I intentionally and misleadingly selected a kind of bone that would fool him.

Although I was supposedly trying to mislead him, I was also the one who explained these basic facts of bone histology to him. The difference in structure between cancellous and compact bone is also irrelevant in this case. Ed claims that EC96-001 is a piece of the shaft of a human tibia, which also happens to be a great place to find good examples of compact bone, like the one I showed him. The claim that I tricked him with an inappropriate piece of compact bone is a red herring...I would have had to use a piece of cancellous bone if I wanted to fool him with a specimen that looked radically different from a tibial fragment.

 

EC96-001 is petrified, and therefore most of the structure has been destroyed

According to Ed, the irregular bright spots in the image of EC96-001 above are the remnants of the Haversian canals, and the structure of the osteons has been lost by replacement. I'm not qualified to discuss the appearance of petrified fossils, so I'll leave it to a geologist to comment on this specific problem. However, if this is the case, the structure has been so thoroughly demolished that there is no remaining histological evidence that this was ever a bone. The bright spots retain none of the features of a Haversian canal, aside from a poor and probably coincidental similarity in distribution. Ed's claim that the structure has been destroyed by petrification is simply an admission that the histological evidence that this is bone is not present.

 

Although the thin sections look different, scrapings of human bone look similar to scrapings from his specimens, therefore his specimens are bone

It is very unfortunate that we did not take any images of some of his scrapings. To a point, he is correct: if you crudely scrape off thick chunks of bone with a pocketknife, and compare them to equivalently prepared chunks of his specimen, they do look very roughly similar. However, this proves absolutely nothing except that poor preparations produce uninterpretable results. If we ran a cat and a dog through a meat grinder, we would end up with two nearly identical piles of meat; however, that does not demonstrate that a cat is a dog.

I must emphasize that the above statements are my interpretation of Ed Conrad's most recent excuses. If he provides an analysis that is more satisfactory to him on his web site I will add a link to it here.

None of the diagnostic anatomical features of human bone are present in any of the specimens Ed Conrad has shown.

In other words, these pieces of rock only look like bone to a nåive and untrained eye. It is very convenient that none of the specimens retain any of the specific features that would allow us to precisely identify them; they are all simple geometric shapes, a cylinder or a bowl or a flattened, bent rod, with all of the important articulating surfaces obligingly broken off. Ed claims to have 80000 specimens. Isn't it a little surprising that none of them display any of the condyles, protuberances, or muscle insertions that you would expect in a fossil bone assemblage? He reasonably argues that they have been shattered and distorted in the process of petrification, but even so it should be possible to find a nearly complete bone that had broken into many pieces, and reconstruct it, especially since he claims this remarkable fossil bed contains even fossilized soft tissues. Compare the picture of EC96-001 (claimed to be the shaft of a tibia by Ed Conrad) on MacRae's web page with a diagram of a human tibia. Where is the specimen with any of the unequivocal anatomical elements of a tibia in Ed's huge collection?

There is another curious omission in the Conrad collection: where are the teeth? Teeth are the hardest, densest part of the body, and among the most likely to be fossilized. They are also complex in shape, unlikely to be mistaken for other geological features, and very useful in identifying the species. Ed has found jaws (with all the tooth-bearing surfaces broken off), even a gall bladder, but no unambiguous teeth (although he does claim one improbable instance).

 

None of the histological features of bone are present in any of the specimens that have been examined.

EC96-001 is a perfect example: a superficial resemblance to a piece of long bone falls apart under careful scrutiny. There are no Haversian systems visible in this specimen, despite Ed's fervent wishes. Most of his specimens are fragmentary and lack detail, so they require some kind of microstructural confirmation that they are indeed bone. In the observations described here we looked for evidence of Haversian systems in one of his specimens: it completely and unquestionably failed to meet any reasonable histological standard for bone.

Ed Conrad has presented no compelling anatomical or histological evidence that any of his specimens are fossilized bone of any kind. The recent scientific assessments of his specimens have all suggested that they are concretions, nothing more. Additionally, Ed Conrad has, in his posts to talk.origins, presented himself as a self-taught expert in anatomy, histology, and microscopy. However, in every case in which his claims have been subjected to any kind of scrutiny, he has been found to be inexcusably ignorant of even the most elementary concepts of those fields. He is an enthusiastic amateur who has a flawed and poorly defined image of the scientific process, and specifically, of the human fossil record. He has been seeking out odd-shaped rocks that fit his delusions for the past 15 years, and is now trying to find some sliver of confirmation from the rest of us, so far with little success.