The discovery of soft tissue in fossilized dinosaur bone was initially dismissed as contamination, and the reflex was reasonable: proteins were thought to degrade within, at most, a million years, and the specimens were tens of millions of years old. What the skeptics underestimated was not the chemistry of decay but the range of conditions under which it operates. Subsequent work showed that iron liberated from the animal's own hemoglobin can cross-link and stabilize proteins, acting rather as formaldehyde does in a laboratory. The original objection was thus not so much wrong as parochial: it generalized from decay rates observed under ordinary conditions to a universal ceiling that the fossil record did not, in fact, respect.