Fossil Shrimp
Our experience teaches us that soft tissues degenerate rapidly. How long would a dead shrimp maintain this detail washed up on a beach? The rock must have formed more rapidly than the deterioration of minute features.
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How long does it take a fern to wilt? An hour? 12 hours? A day? A week? Thousands of years?

This fern was fossilized before it had time to wilt!

This unwilted fern was fossilized while it was being held in a bent position, before it was able to spring back straight.

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Fish Eating Fish
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Live Jellyfish

Fossil Jellyfish

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Fossilized worms
Several locations near Glen Rose Texas reveal thousands of fossilized worms that are perfectly three dimensional. How long does it take worms to deteriorate? Even if covered rapidly, pressure from overlying layers would flatten if the worms were not turned into rock rapidly. Obviously, very rapid lithification is required in order to preserve such astonishing detail.
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Fossilized Dinosaur Heart!

"Minerals, however, did not replace soft tissue in the bones excavated from the banks of Alaska's Colville River west of Prudhoe Bay. 'They're as light as balsa wood and look as fresh as yesterday's dog bones,' says Canadian paleontologist Phil Currie... For more than 65 million years the remains of the vegetarian duck-billed dinosaurs and other creatures lay buried in the now-frozen tundra, which was once a coastal swamp with a subtropical-to-temperate climate.'...their structure was porous and the fossils were not remineralized.' Therefore, in their deep freeze, the Alaskan bones may well have preserved some of their DNA." Omni, 1/90, p.32

Coming 

small dinosaur articulated with soft parts preserved.

Dinosaur blood cells

"Round and tiny and nucleated, they were threaded through the bone like red blood cells in blood vessels. But blood cells in a dinosaur bone should have disappeared eons ago. 'I got goose bumps. ...It was exactly like looking at a slice of modern bone. But, of course, I couldn't believe it. ...The bones are, after all 65 million years old. How could blood cells survive that long?'" (Science, Research News, V.261, 9/7/'93)
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