The discovery of soft tissue in certain dinosaur fossils was initially met with disbelief, since organic material was assumed to degrade within, at most, a few hundred thousand years. Rather than concluding that the fossils were far younger than their geological context implied—a claim seized upon by some outside the field—paleontologists asked instead whether the assumption about degradation might be incomplete. Subsequent work identified plausible preservation mechanisms: iron liberated from decaying blood cells, they proposed, could cross-link proteins into a more durable form, and a fossil sealed from oxygen and microbes might escape the usual pathways of decay. The episode illustrates a recurring pattern in science, in which an anomalous observation is more fruitfully treated as a gap in a background assumption than as an overthrow of a well-supported framework.