Can This Dog Sniff Out Fossils? | The Institute for Creation Research

Can This Dog Sniff Out Fossils?

Gary Jackson and his dog Migaloo, trained to sniff out buried remains, work with locals to uncover archaeological sites and help Australian police locate the bodies of murder victims. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, "Migaloo quickly located the 600-year-old remains of an indigenous Australian,"1 which researchers found a decade ago. But that specialized training resulted in an unforeseen crossover—Migaloo can also smell fossils.

Fossils are supposed to be rocks in the shape of bones, with no original bone material remaining. Over supposed eons, gradually trickling minerals slowly replaced the long-dead creature's bone material. Museums and textbooks widely teach that this process takes millions of years. If that's really how it happened, then the bones should no longer smell different from the surrounding rock.

Remains buried for dozens or maybe even a few thousand years might still retain some of their original organic components. But original organics are out of the question for remains buried for a million years. If the original material wasn't replaced by minerals, then it would have decayed and disappeared long before a million years elapsed—especially in the warm Australian climate.

Apparently, nobody explained these fossilization issues to Migaloo and her sensitive sniffer. The black Labrador-bull mastiff identified megafauna bone remains tagged as being between 2.6 and 5.3 million years old. How did she find fossils so well?

University of Queensland paleontologist Steve Salisbury told the Herald, "It seems very feasible to me that there would still be odour attached to a corpse but fossil bone is another thing. We're talking millions of years old, where the original bone and internal structure has been re-mineralised and essentially become a rock. That's why I question whether she can smell the difference."1 Why does Salisbury stick closer to the remains' undemonstrated age assignment than to Migaloo's demonstrated ability to pick up the bones' scent?

This doubt seems to arise not from the observable evidence—either from analyzing the fossils or from observing Migaloo—but from belief in unobserved millions of years.

But the dog can smell something different in those fossil bones. Maybe underground processes never did re-mineralize the bones. And if they still retain original organics, then maybe they are simply not millions of years old.

After all, paleontologists continue to find "unmineralized" fossils—fossils with original proteins and cells—all over the world. Original tissue fossils, designated as tens of millions of years old, hearken from several U.S. states, as well as Brazil, Argentina, Great Britain, Germany, Chinese provinces, Italy, and Belgium.2 The still-intact organic molecules inside these fossils show that all their rock layers look many times younger than their evolutionary age assignments.

"I'd like to believe it. If she can find fossilised bone, then that would make our searches a lot easier. I'm ready to watch and be surprised - that would be really exciting," Salisbury said.1 It sure would be, not just because dog noses would make fossils searches easier, but because original, unmineralized organic materials in fossils might force clear-thinking people to reassess fossil age assignments.

References

  1. Mann, Effie. "Migaloo the super snout's on the case." The Sydney Morning Herald. Posted on smh.com.au April 28, 2013, accessed May 19, 2013.
  2. Many of these finds are cataloged at www.icr.org.

* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.

Article posted on May 29, 2013.

The Latest
ACTS & FACTS
Pervasive Genome Functionality Destroys the Myth of Junk DNA
In 2001, the first rough draft of the human genome was published in a collaborative effort between private industry and the public sector.1,2...

NEWS
Happy Labor Day 2025
“For we are laborers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.” (1 Corinthians 3:9) Labor Day was...

ACTS & FACTS
The Age of Reptiles Myth
We hear about the Age of Reptiles, also called the Age of Dinosaurs, almost as early as we can understand the idea. Even kindergarteners might be taught...

ACTS & FACTS
The Tiktaalik Missing Link Myth
In 2004, the paleontological community—and the world—was presented with what many evolutionists considered to be a dyedin- the-wool missing...

ACTS & FACTS
Archaeopteryx, Myth of a Transitional Fossil
In 1860, one year after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a wonderfully preserved fossil feather was discovered in...

ACTS & FACTS
Busting the Myth about Lucy
by Brian Thomas, Ph.D., and Chris Rupe, Ph.D.* Most folks consider our ape ancestry as established science, with Lucy as the main link. However,...

ACTS & FACTS
Evolutionary Vestigial Features: Worse Than Myth, a Scam
Due to teachers’ influence during the formative years of young people’s lives, they can be a powerful force in spreading evolution to new...

ACTS & FACTS
Blind Cavefish Unmask the Convergent Evolution Myth
Within the ever-expanding theory of evolution, there is a system of specialized language designed to identify each major interpretative concept. Some...

ACTS & FACTS
A Booming Generation
And the king answered them roughly; and king Rehoboam forsook the counsel of the old men, and answered them after the advice of the young men.…And...

ACTS & FACTS
Darwin's Galápagos Finches: The Myth of Natural Selection
A group of birds known as Darwin’s finches (genus Geospiza) lives in the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean 600 miles west of Ecuador....