B-rex is actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T-rex, found in Montana and the fossil was re-named after Bob Harmon, the chief preparator of paleontology Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The primary interest in B-rex centered on the discovery soft-tissue and blood vessels in the estimated 68-million-year-old dinosaur.

Since this medullary tissue in the bone marrow is similar to birds, speculations on the evolution of dinosaur to bird once again emerged in the prime time media. The original report was published in the March 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science was entitled “Gender-Specific Reproductive Tissue in Ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex”.

Surprisingly, along with the interest in the dinosaur-bird connection, more importantly, in the B-rex fossil fragments were found cells and tissues that have remained intact with flexibility and elasticity—a characteristic not thought to be possible after lying in the ground 68 million years.

The evidence is shaking up the paleontology world. “I am quite aware that according to conventional wisdom and models of fossilization, these structures aren’t supposed to be there, but there they are,” said Schweitzer in a newswise interview in 2005. “I was pretty shocked.”

Horner, expanding on Schweitzer’s comments said, “I see this as a really important discovery that will change our methods of collecting and study. We can truly begin asking biomolecular questions. The discovery also means that our preconceived ideas about preservation were wrong.”

Scientists are now facing the challenge that either fossil preservation of cells, also known as soft-tissue, for millions years is possible, or B-rex is only thousands of years old—not millions of years.

Since the medullary tissue in the bone marrow of B-rex is similar to birds, after interviewing Horner, Schweitzer and Carroll, Lesley Stahl declared that the “dinosaur-bird connection is largely settled now”—in other words, birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Charles Darwin addressed the dinosaur-bird evolution theory in The Origin of Species: “Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archaeopteryx.”

At the time, the newly discovered Archaeopteryx fossil in Germany fueled Darwin’s origin of bird speculation. The dinosaur-bird theory of evolution has been the center of research since the fourth edition of The Origin of Species in 1866,

In the book Historical Geology, Carl Dunbar wrote in 1961 that it would be difficult to find a more perfect link or “cogent proof” of the reptilian ancestry of the birds. To paleontologist Pat Shipman, the Archaeopteryx is “more than the world’s most beautiful fossil … [it is] an icon—a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself. It is the First Bird.”

As the scientific evidence continued to mount later in the twentieth century, however, the dinosaur-bird theory of evolution had faded into an evolutionary fable.

At the center of the missing link, status of the Archaeopteryx was feather. According to Darwin, natural selection acts only by “successive, slight modification.” The question is how did the reptile scale change by “slight, successive” changes into a feather?

By the early 1970s, paleontologists began to seriously question the “transitional link” status of the Archaeopteryx scale-feather. In the words of Barbara Stahl in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (1974): “How [birds] arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.”

Alan Feduccia and colleagues, writing in the journal Science in 1979, in the paper entitled “Feathers of the Archaeopteryx: Asymmetric Vanes Indicate Aerodynamic Function,” likewise have concluded that the Archaeopteryx feather was “essentially like those of modern birds” and not a transitional form of the feather.

From the International Archaeopteryx Conference in 1985, Peter Dodson published his conclusion in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: “The general credo runs as follows: Archaeopteryx was a bird that could fly”—not a transitional dinosaur-bird.

Since a dinosaur-bird paleontology, molecular biology, or genetic transitional link does not exist beyond the speculations of Horner, Schweitzer, and Carroll, had Lesley Stahl known the larger debate, the more logical declaration would have been, the “dinosaur-bird evolutionary theory continues to be largely disconnected from the evidence.”

The evolution industry continues scrambling to retrofit evidence into the ever elusive evolution paradigm—a philosophical imperative for the 60 Minute intellectual elite.

In the contentious papers, researchers identified seven fragments from a protein called collagen, found in connective tissue, and said their sequences most closely matched the chicken version of the protein. The samples came from the fossilized femur of a T. Rex. As well as further strengthening the evidence for the link between dinosaurs and birds, the findings would make the protein the oldest ever to be sequenced. The work, published in Science, garnered headlines worldwide and met with considerable scepticism at the time, for good reason—fraud.

The hunt for Darwin’s “inconceivably great” missing links continues.