I think it's not fair to say that "soft tissue survives".
These stories are all about bone. When you look at a piece of fossilized dinosaur bone, it's all rock. What the first article (from 2006) discusses is the work of Mary Schweitzer who has published several papers claiming that she has been able to extract _proteins_ from the fossilized _bone_: specifically collagen. Others imagine seeing "red blood cell type of structures".
It's mainly one person, Mary Schweitzer, publishing these claims. Schweitzer's 2007 article with Asara was called into question e.g. by Pevzner et al. in 2008 and others.
The mineralization of bone may ofcourse leave imprints of microscopic tissue structures in the remaining rock. I wouldn't call it soft tissue surviving.
"UC San Diego computational biologist Pavel Pevzner, a prominent skeptic, said the study doesn't change anything. Pevzner said these claims run up against a great body of research that has failed to find soft tissue components in much younger tissues. Moreover, he said previous criticism that one study's results were tainted by contamination has not been adequately addressed."
"One of the original claims made, that hemoglobin fragments purportedly from T. rex closely resembled those of ostriches, is likely the result of contamination with the lab's earlier work with ostriches, Pevzner said. No subsequent studies have ruled out that possibility.
"'The big elephant in the room of this research is actually an ostrich,' Pevzner said. 'There is no hemoglobin reported from much younger (fossil) samples, like cave bears, mastodons, or anything else. In samples 10,000 years old, you don't find hemoglobin. But they found hemoglobin ... It has become a textbook example of how science should not be made.'
Intact for a 110M year old fossil means just that, it does not mean that the tissue has not been fossilized, it means it has not decomposed as it normally would.
If soft tissue and skin follow their normal path all you'd have is bones. Intact here means that the material is still present, but in fossilized form (just like fossilized bones are no longer the same as real bones).
The 'intact' is very much important here because that means it is not just fragments.
But clearly many here understood it so that there is literally intact skin and tissues that could be used to extract DNA. So the word "intact" was misleading.
