How can we know how old fossils are?

[Anomalocaris]

? Anomalocaris ?

There was/has been no 'Soft tissue' found in dino bones.

I think (Running off memory. Will try and find a link or such) that the best they've found is, effectivly, 'Rust'.
As in the litteral elements left over from hemoglobin.
If you find a different link first, that'd be great.


Cheers.

EDIT: Here's a couple of links I found talking about the issue.







 Here's another one further explaining the paper by the scientist.





 Sorry they're some folks youtubes. Best I could do atm.


Cheers.

Not at work.

Uh, no.  There was soft tissue.  

When this was first reported, various explanation were provided to the effect that what looked like structured soft tissue inside the bone was in fact organic mats laid down by recent bacterial contamination. But that explanation took a hit when proteins normally only found in birds were isolated from the tissues. The resistance to accepting real dinosaur tissue might actually survive entombed in fossils stems from the conviction that complex protein in real soft tissue would inevitably chemically degrade over hundreds of thousands of years,  far less than the age of the dinosaur fossil.    

However subsequently it was shown that under some preservation conditions where remnants of hemoglobins are preserved with the tissues in parts of fossil sealed from the entombing sediments, hemoglobin release free radicals that cause amino acids in the proteins of surrounding tissues to form cross linked chains in exactly the same way as formaldehyde would, which allow the altered proteins and soft tissue to resist chemical degradation on time scale of hundreds of millions of years exactly as formaldehyde would.

So the preservation of soft tissue over hundreds of millions of years does have a plausible mechanism, and is no longer as mysterious or as incredible as it had seemed when first instances were reported about 15 years ago.