Here I raise my Ebenezer

Robert Robinson's Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing has a line, "Here I raise my Ebenezer, here by thy great help I come."  Thanks to Ken Ham and recent events that line has been in the back of my mind now for a while.  The Creation Museum has recently unveiled their Allosaurus fragilis,Ebenezer, and have invited scientists from around the world to come study her.  

Her name literally meaning, "stone of help", Ebenezer has a long complicated past in the evangelical world.  Though sources differ over when between 2000-2002, she was ultimately unearthed, in 2002 by the Vision Forum and a group of homeschoolers.  According to a creationist article at WorldNetDaily, Ebenezer was found with unfossilized or at least not completely fossilized plant debris.  

“We found a complete section of vertebrae more than 12 feet in length, which was fully articulated. The dinosaur appears to be in much the same position as he was at the time of his death and burial, which must have been virtually instantaneous, and caused by a catastrophic event. Not only was this fully articulated dinosaur found lying in a bed of leaves and plant debris, but there is wood from trees mixed in among the bones, some of which contains petrified and unpetrified elements in the same piece of wood. If this creature were millions of years old, the evidence would look quite different.”

According to Rachel Maddow, Dr. Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis will not vouch for the unfossilized plant debris.  He does however continue to date the fossil to the flood year by the position of the bones.

Dr. Snelling added that the intact skeleton of this allosaur is a testimony to an extremely rapid burial, which is confirmation of the global catastrophe of a Flood a few thousand years ago.

Dr. Mary Schweitzer has found soft tissues within dinosaur bones.  However Vision Forum's claims are even more profound.  Still the supposed discovery of unfossilized Mesozoic material that supposedly disproves an old earth is far from new.  I remember in High School attending a creationism conference in the late 90's.  One of the speakers said something so remarkable that I thought I knew that creationism was about to supplant the Theory of Evolution.  The speaker noted that during a 1994 expedition, Buddy Davis claimed to have found unfossilized dinosaur bones complete with unfossilized ligaments.  The man, who most of his sculptures reside in the Creation Museum, claimed to have discovered things that Schweitzer can only dream.   

Why is Ken Ham not inviting researchers to study unpetrified Mesozoic wood or dinosaur ligaments?  Surely if Ham had such things or if such things have been discovered, he would surely have invited Schweitzer herself to study them.  Twenty years later I think we can safely conclude that Ken and Buddy have no such thing.