From your source:
After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/#qOP6l2R3iuoHbCW0.99
But this is untrue. Fossilized organisms from the Burgess shale, discovered early in the last century, show that soft tissue can be gradually replaced by minerals, with very detailed structure remaining. That's not news to anyone who has any knowledge of fossils:
The Burgess Shale is famous for its exquisite fossils of soft-bodied organisms. It is exceptional to find complete animals preserved, especially ones that had only soft tissues and no mineralized structures. (Typically it is only the hard parts of organisms - shell or bone - that become fossils.) When this happens (taphonomy section) palaeontologists can gain a tremendous amount of ecological and biological information about a particular time in Earth's history. The Burgess Shale is such a site, providing the best window on animal communities during the end of the Cambrian Explosion.
http://burgess-shale.rom.on.ca/en/science/burgess-shale/03-fossils.php
So this is another cautionary tale about trying to get information from a source that is not actually a journal of the subject in question.
Smithsonian is a popular magazine like
National Geographic (which also has occasionally dropped a clanger because they don't do peer review).
And the cited article?
...Mark H. Armitage, a microscope technician (not a professional biologist). He did some undergrad work in Biology at University of Florida, but didn’t graduate. Then he got his B.S. in Education from Jerry Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University, and his M.S. in Biology (parasitology) from the Institute of Creation Research, an unaccredited fundamentalist organization that has since left California and closed down its graduate program. As many others have shown, the ICR “Master’s Degree” was a sham, consisting of little more that incompetently done book reports and quote-mining from legitimate scientific literature with a creationist spin, not legitimate scientific research. I’ve seen a number of “master’s theses” from there—they are so bad they wouldn’t even pass for a freshman book report. Prior to his employment at CSUN, he was employed as a microscope technician at a variety of Christian schools. But he has no Ph.D., no formal training or peer-reviewed published research in the histology he was working on. He’s just a humble lab tech on a 2-day a week part-time gig, with no guarantee of employment from one semester to the next. His sole job is to maintain and keep track of the microscopes in a big department with hundreds of them, not to teach courses or do research.
http://www.skepticblog.org/2014/09/04/a-creationist-mole-and-a-sorry-mess/
So a microscope repairman, unable to publish his story in journal of palentology, found a journal of histochemistry that was willing to publish without peer review by geochemists or paleontologists. When other scientists were unable to reproduce his results, he was in a bit of a fix. Should he have been fired? He had no contract, and California is an at-will state.
California's Labor Code specifies that an employment relationship with no specified duration is presumed to be employment “at-will.” This means, at least in theory, that the employer or employee may terminate the employment relationship at any time, with or without cause.
https://www.google.com/search?q=california+employment+at+will&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Schweitzer herself disagrees with Armitage's assumptions about tissue. The "blood vessels" are made up of collagen, but no cells remain, much less tissue. She remarked that his article was only anatomy; Armitage himself admitted that he left out his conclusions in order to get the article published.
As you learned, biological molecules can exist for many millions of years under the right conditions. But so far, no one has been able to show cells or tissues surviving. The soft tissue that was fossilized in the Burgess shale is no longer tissue, but was replaced very slowly by minerals. The tissue in the dinosaur bone decayed and only some collagen, heme and other molecules survived millions of years, which is also not surprising, given decay rates in such environments.
