Dating Fossils

MG1962 said:
It was explained to us here the last time the question came up in a thread with haunting similarity to this one. A microscope scientist is the hardware expert that apparently knows how to make the microscope do what ever it is the particular research team is looking to do.

Many people visualize an optical microscope when talking about such things but these days there are microscopes that work from X-Rays, electrons, neutrons, even sounds.

So there can be some pretty serious physics going on in some of these labs
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Ok. Thanks. It's just that in my many years of experience in a chemical sciences school, these people were called microscopists, as a title, sort of like one would call others "assistants, technicians or engineers". I found it odd that googling the term "microscope scientist" turns up only stock photos of what in scientific circles one would call a lab technician.

As it turns out, it seems that Mark Armitage, the "microscope scientist" in question was a lab technician until July of 2014. In this Fox News article, he is referred to as a "long time microscope scientist". I wonder if that might be his own term of choice.

Scientist claims California university fired him over creationist beliefs

Mark Armitage, a scientist and evangelical Christian, claims he was fired from his job as a lab technician at California State University at Northridge because he published an academic paper which appeared to support his creationist views, according to a lawsuit filed last week.
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Upon further examination of the fossils under a high-powered microscope, Armitage made a stunning find -- soft tissue inside the triceratops horn with bone cells, or osteocytes, that looked alive.

Scientists who study dinosaurs have long believed that triceratops existed some 68 million years ago and became extinct about 65 million years ago.

Armitage's finding, however, challenged that assertion. He argued the triceratops must be much younger or else those cells would have "decayed into nothingness," according to the July 22 lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
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John Jones said:
The highlighted is what I suspect. The use of carbon 14 in the cited journal was deliberate and repeated, Here it is:

http://www.ancient-origins.net/news...-horn-dated-33500-020159#sthash.TWiUWsg6.dpuf

I know nothing about that web site. Before I wrote it off as pseudoscience, I wanted to make sure there wasn't a legitimate reason for doing this (14C dating of dinosaur fossils) that I didn't know about.
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The site is clearly fascist balderdash, with articles like these.

- The human skull that challenges the Out of Africa theory
- The symbol of the Swastika and its 12,000-year-old history.
 
Gawdzilla said:
Not there, policy is to find reasons the Bible is RIGHT!!!
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The Bible makes no mention of the age of the Earth. Those estimates have been made much later by various sects lacking, (or in spite of) better evidence.

What I am curious about though is exactly the majority view as to why these tests are getting results? What exactly is the scientific explanation?
 
Red Baron Farms said:
The Bible makes no mention of the age of the Earth. Those estimates have been made much later by various sects lacking, (or in spite of) better evidence.
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Bishop Ussher calculated the Earth and everything else was created on Oct. 23, 4004 BC. He did this by assuming the Bible was absolutely accurate and the genealogies were the way to work backwards. I think he was smoking something. He never bothered explaining why people who lived hundreds of years had no impact on events just one years after their birth.
What I am curious about though is exactly the majority view as to why these tests are getting results? What exactly is the scientific explanation?
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Contaminated samples, or contaminated minds, either one works.
 
Red Baron Farms said:
The Bible makes no mention of the age of the Earth. Those estimates have been made much later by various sects lacking, (or in spite of) better evidence.

What I am curious about though is exactly the majority view as to why these tests are getting results? What exactly is the scientific explanation?
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What he is claiming to have tested is not the actual fossilized remains of the creature, but some remnants of soft tissue found in the horn.
 
Red Baron Farms said:
Horn tissue it not part of the creature?:jaw-dropp
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No the potential existence of the soft tissue is the problem. There has been a little bit of controversy over this specimen and others as to what the actual material is. The jury seems to be still out on the subject
 
Gawdzilla said:
Soft tissue survived over 65,000,000 years?

(And let's leave my refrigerator out of this, please.)
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I am pretty sure that is the hypothesis, with a whole lot of strong evidence, even repeatable evidence from multiple sources.

The age thing bothers me just a bit though. What exactly is the scientific explanation? I get that carbon 14 can't be used over 50-60K years. It has to do with the 1/2 life of Carbon 14. Beyond a certain point the accuracy drops off because most the C14 is back to N14 in the absence of cosmic rays.

So what exactly would create a bunch more C14? Some samples I could understand being contaminated with younger material, but many samples tested many places? Did something happen that reset the C14 clock?:confused:
 
Red Baron Farms said:
I am pretty sure that is the hypothesis, with a whole lot of strong evidence, even repeatable evidence from multiple sources.

The age thing bothers me just a bit though. What exactly is the scientific explanation? I get that carbon 14 can't be used over 50-60K years. It has to do with the 1/2 life of Carbon 14. Beyond a certain point the accuracy drops off because most the C14 is back to N14 in the absence of cosmic rays.

So what exactly would create a bunch more C14? Some samples I could understand being contaminated with younger material, but many samples tested many places? Did something happen that reset the C14 clock?:confused:
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No one can answer these questions until they can settle the question of what the material actually is. It might be soft tissue remnants from the creature, it probably isn't
 
MG1962 said:
No the potential existence of the soft tissue is the problem. There has been a little bit of controversy over this specimen and others as to what the actual material is. The jury seems to be still out on the subject
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What difference would whether it was soft tissue or not make? 14C decays at determined rate regardless
 
Gawdzilla said:
Bishop Ussher calculated the Earth and everything else was created on Oct. 23, 4004 BC. He did this by assuming the Bible was absolutely accurate and the genealogies were the way to work backwards.
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Ironically, Bishop Ussher was a voice of reason in his age. At the time we had no idea how old the Earth was, and the most absurd notions of its age imaginable were tossed out with absolute seriousness--for example, a popular school of thought was that the world was infinitely old. Ussher was attempting to constrain the disucssion to rational options. While we can criticize his methodology, his goal is one that I believe we can all sympathize with.

Steven J. Gould wrote about this history (with all the citations one would expect from a man who more frequently wrote journal articles ) in one of his essays. I beleive it's in "Eight Little Piggies", but it may be in "Leonardo and the Diet of Worms"; it's been a while since I've read them, and my books are all packed in preparation for a move, so you'll have to look for it yourself, unfortunately.

Red Baron Farms said:
What I am curious about though is exactly the majority view as to why these tests are getting results? What exactly is the scientific explanation?
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There are a number of options. One is contamination, either via non-dead carbon (ie, carbon with C14 in it; carbon lacking C14 is refered to as dead carbon amongst us paleo types) during some point in the fossil's history or (more likely) contamination due to poor handling of the specimen. There's also the fact that any material with carbon in it will give you SOME results--this is a statistical thing, so "zero" isn't an option. They don't count individual atoms; no one can. So there's always a background value that will be shown in any carbon tested, even dead carbon. Such results are meaningless; they literally represent random variations in the background radiation. But dishonest folks can use them to pretend they've got something.

The actual process of radiometric dating is extremely technical, and most people don't understand it. Without that understanding, the results of this sort of sample are meaningless or worse, misleading.
 
John Jones said:
What difference would whether it was soft tissue or not make? 14C decays at determined rate regardless
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It's a question of where the soft tissue came from. If it came from later contamination from bacteria or some other organism (they can get astonishingly far into the rocks) what you'd be measuring is the age of that biological contamination, NOT the fossil.
 
This is a free pdf copy of Armitage's 2013 paper in Acta Histochemica that angered his department and got him fired. It's largely over my head, but might be interesting for dissection by those in the know.

Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur
Triceratops horridus

Here's another discussion with comments by his detractors.
http://www.proof-of-evolution.com/soft-tissues-in-triceratops-horn.html

From this, I found an interesting article about Mary Schweitzer's research on soft tissue in Tyrannosaurus Rex bones.

The controversial discovery of 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to new research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay.
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Red Baron Farms said:
So what exactly would create a bunch more C14? Some samples I could understand being contaminated with younger material, but many samples tested many places? Did something happen that reset the C14 clock?:confused:
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C14 can be created in situ by natural radioactivity from C13. That's believed to be relevant in coal, AFAIK.


Contamination may be artificially or naturally caused. Artificial contamination may be blamed on human negligence during the collection and processing of samples. Contaminants often include ash from tobacco, hair and fibres, paper from packing material and oil or grease (Hogg, 1982:21). Natural contamination occurs in the post-depositional environment. Samples may be contaminated by material which make any radiocarbon result either too old or too young. The most common source of contamination by modern carbon is caused by rootlet intrusion.
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http://www.c14dating.com/pret.html

Of course, pretreatment methods can't help adding a bit of contamination.

This article which someone posted in the comments to OP's link also has some interesting info: http://ncse.com/files/pub/CEJ/pdfs/CEJ_30.pdf
 
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