I recently posted a new episode of my ongoing Hemoglobin Challenge series that illustrates the usual pattern of YEC soft-tissue misrepresentation, but also involves a claim I can only describe as a straightforward falsehood. The subject is a preserved piece of lizard skin from the Green River Formation, a fossil that has been the subject of careful molecular analysis, and a meme that has now circulated through at least fifteen different Facebook groups.
The Hemoglobin Challenge, for those new to the series, is my standing invitation to young-earth creationist communicators: accurately describe what the scientific literature actually says about the preservation of ancient biomolecules in fossil specimens. The series takes its name from hemoglobin and blood cells, since these are among the most commonly misrepresented findings in YEC arguments — but no intact hemoglobin molecules or blood cells have in fact been found preserved in fossil material. What researchers have found, in carefully analyzed specimens, are the highly altered, chemically stabilized remnants of those molecules. The distinction matters enormously, and whether a YEC communicator honors it is precisely what the challenge is designed to test.
A Meme Circulating on Facebook
Today’s participant is Peter Fiske, a young-earth creationist social media influencer I have been discussing in recent episodes. Fiske has been sharing a meme headlined “Soft tissue discovered in 50 million year old lizard” across dozens of Facebook groups and other platforms. The meme’s source is a site called Biblical Creation, which turns out to be a lightly modified version of a 2011 Answers in Genesis article by Tommy Mitchell — a piece we will return to shortly, because it actually tells a different story than the meme does.
The fossil in question is a specimen of lizard skin from the Green River Formation, preserved in a way that retains not only the outline and texture of the scales but some molecular remnants as well. I want to be clear about this: I have read the paper, and there are indeed some original biomolecules present. The question, as always, is what kind of biomolecules, in what condition, and whether the YEC description of them matches what the researchers actually report.
What the Paper Actually Found
The title of the relevant paper is “Infrared Mapping Results, Soft Tissue Preservation, and 50 Million Year Old Reptile Skin.” When paleontologists use the phrase “soft tissue” in a paper title, they are writing for other paleontologists — colleagues who understand that the term refers to non-bony biological structures whose morphological impression has been preserved, not to the presence of fresh, biologically active cellular material. That distinction is not a footnote; it is the entire interpretive framework.
What the authors actually found, through infrared mapping and related chemical analyses, were remnants of beta-keratin which is a structural protein that is one of the major components of reptile scales. And even “remnants” is the precise word here: not complete, intact keratin molecules, but highly modified, chemically altered fragments whose molecular bonding pattern still carries enough of a signature to allow identification. Metal ions appear to have bound to portions of the original protein, stabilizing it through a process of molecular reorganization that is better understood as a form of fossilization than as preservation in any ordinary biological sense. No cells were found. No tissues were found. What was found were the altered molecular remains of a protein that was once part of those structures — evidence of extraordinary chemical complexity in the fossilization process, and nothing more.
The meme Fiske is circulating implies that “soft tissue” in the lay sense which is actual pliable, cellular, biologically recognizable skin that has survived intact for fifty million years, which is precisely the inference a general audience will draw from the phrase “soft tissue discovered in 50 million year old lizard.” That inference is not supported by the paper.
Tommy Mitchell Passes; Peter Fiske Does Not
Here is where the original AiG source becomes instructive. Tommy Mitchell’s 2011 article, which ultimately underlies Fiske’s meme, is actually more careful than what Fiske is circulating. Mitchell writes that “a team from England confirmed the existence of soft skin tissue known as keratin” — a sentence that is imprecise in calling it tissue, and that does not clarify these are chemically modified fragments rather than intact molecules, but that at least identifies keratin as the specific finding. Mitchell does not fabricate the discovery of cells or make claims that go beyond what the paper reports. He is not 100% accurate, but he is recognizably describing the same paper. For the purposes of the Hemoglobin Challenge, I am prepared to give Mitchell a passing grade, or at minimum to say that the distance between his article and the original paper is much smaller than the distance between his article and Fiske’s meme.
Fiske does not pass. The meme he is distributing at scale is not a cautious overstatement. It is a significant misrepresentation of what the scientific literature actually shows.
“Scientists Don’t Even Call It a Fossil”
But there is a second claim in the meme that troubles me more than the soft-tissue language, because it cannot be attributed to imprecision or careless reading. The meme states that the scientists who wrote the paper “don’t even call it a fossil” — the clear implication being that they themselves recognize the specimen as too fresh, too well-preserved, too biological to count as fossilized material. This is presented as a damning concession from the scientific community itself.
I went back to the paper. The authors use the word “fossilized” repeatedly — fossilized reptile skin, fossil specimen, fossil skin, fossilized soft tissue. The claim that scientists don’t call it a fossil is flatly contradicted by the paper it purports to describe. Fossilization, it bears mentioning, does not mean that an object has turned entirely to stone; it means that it has been altered from its original biological condition and preserved through chemical and physical processes over geological time. Even the altered beta-keratin fragments in this specimen are, in a precise sense, fossilized — their chemical structure has been modified through the binding of metal ions and molecular reorganization that has stabilized them across fifty million years. The rest of the skin has been mineralized in the more familiar sense. The specimen is, throughout, a fossil.
It is possible (well, no very probably) that Fiske did not personally read the paper and is simply passing along content from the Biblical Creation website without scrutiny. That possibility does not improve matters — a communicator who circulates claims about scientific papers to tens of thousands of followers across social media platforms has an obligation to verify those claims. The suggestion that scientists refused to call this specimen a fossil is not a matter of interpretation. It is demonstrably false. And it is false in a direction that serves a rhetorical purpose: making the specimen sound more like fresh tissue than like a fifty-million-year-old geological artifact.
What the Fossil Actually Teaches Us
What this specimen actually represents, when described accurately, is something genuinely fascinating. The science of fossil biomolecule preservation has advanced dramatically in the past two decades, driven by analytical instruments and techniques that did not exist thirty years ago. Infrared mapping, mass spectrometry, and related approaches are now allowing researchers to detect molecular signals in fossils that earlier generations of paleontologists had no way of identifying. We are learning that fossilization is far more chemically complex than earlier, simpler models assumed, and that certain biological signals can persist in altered form far longer than those models predicted. That is an exciting development for anyone who wants to understand how the history of life has been recorded in stone. It does not require exaggeration to be interesting, and it does not support a young earth when examined carefully.
If you would like to work through the original paper and the meme side by side, I invite you to watch the full video linked below. The Hemoglobin Challenge continues to be, I think, a useful exercise — not because I enjoy finding fault, but because accurate science communication matters, and because the people who follow these social media accounts deserve to know what the evidence actually shows.
Blessings, Joel
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?