Dating Fossils

John Jones said:
I have a question: Is there a legitimate reason to 14C date something presumed to be >65 million years old?
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I don't really have much to add...C14 is so wildly inappropriate for dinosaur fossils that you may as well try to date it by looking for a "Use By" date stamped on it; the two methods are equally valid.

My guess is that the numbers came from some sort of contamination. It's not uncommon--you'd be amazed how much stuff moves around in groundwater, and Creationists aren't known for proper sample handling.

This seems to be a typical Creationist tactic: test something in a way that's completely wrong, get nonsensical results, declare the method invalid. They did the same crap with the Mt. St. Helens eruption--they sent samples out to be dated via a method that doesn't work for anything less than a few million years old (it has the opposite problem of C14--not enough daughter product to be detected until then), used a mineral that didn't reach closing temperature during the eruption (ie, it preserved an older date), and got an absurdly old value (the value of when the xenocrysts last reached closing temperature). Therefore radiometric dating doesn't work! As Correa Neto said, it's doubly dishonest.
 
I had a "guide" in a storefront creation museum tell me coprolites were impossible. I resisted the severe need to say that his presence proved otherwise and told him at least one way they could have been preserved. I've seen elk droppings covered by boiling mud at Yellowstone. He didn't like that.
 
Dinwar said:
I don't really have much to add...C14 is so wildly inappropriate for dinosaur fossils that you may as well try to date it by looking for a "Use By" date stamped on it; the two methods are equally valid.

[...]
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This is a great response, as were all the other responses to the OP. I'm gonna use it unless you object.
 
Olowkow said:
Where the Institute for Creation Research is involved, all bets are off. They like to make **** up. And by the way, what's a "microscope scientist"? :rolleyes:
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A scientist who studies microscopes: how they work, their anatomy and physiology, their food chains/ecology and all related and their evolution......:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
Gawdzilla said:
I had a "guide" in a storefront creation museum tell me coprolites were impossible. I resisted the severe need to say that his presence proved otherwise and told him at least one way they could have been preserved. I've seen elk droppings covered by boiling mud at Yellowstone. He didn't like that.
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You really should have pressed further - make him so mad he eats *****and dies!!:jaw-dropp
 
fuelair said:
A scientist who studies microscopes: how they work, their anatomy and physiology, their food chains/ecology and all related and their evolution......:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
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Microscope scientist is a legitimate job title.
 
MG1962 said:
Microscope scientist is a legitimate job title.
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I do not disagree, that's why the snarkie smilies.....Just questioning the functionality
knowledge/abilities of that particular microscope scientist.........:D:D:D
 
Gawdzilla said:
I decided to Google to make sure I was right.

I was wrong. :o
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It's not clear, but it seems we are both right, sort of.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200403/history.cfm
It fell to a Dutch scientist, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, to make further improvements. Van Leeuwenhoek is sometimes popularly credited with the microscope's invention. He wasn't the inventor, but he was a great admirer of the Micrographia, and his instruments were the best of his era in terms of magnification: he achieved magnifying power up to 270 times larger than the actual size of the sample, using a single lens. He used his microscopes to describe bacteria harvested from tooth scrapings, and to study protozoans found in pond water.
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fuelair said:
I do not disagree, that's why the snarkie smilies.....Just questioning the functionality
knowledge/abilities of that particular microscope scientist.........:D:D:D
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I've known a few Bunsen Burner scientists, and several fume hood scientists.
 
John Jones said:
I have a question: Is there a legitimate reason to 14C date something presumed to be >65 million years old?
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It might be done for calibration purposes. You take a material which should not contain any C14 and measure it. That tells you, probably, how much contamination you introduce with your procedures and how sensitive the machine really is and so on.
Coal and diamonds are used for the purpose. Using fossils is obviously silly.
 
MG1962 said:
Microscope scientist is a legitimate job title.
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That's interesting. What field? I've never heard Microscope scientist as a job title, just "microscopist". Try googling "microscope scientist" with quotes. I mostly get "...microscope, scientist..." or "electron microscope scientist" etc.
 
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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This, from that website, set my alarm bells ringing:
Numerous independent researchers have long argued that there is evidence man and dinosaur once walked the Earth together, such as hundreds of ancient artworks and artifacts that appear to depict dinosaurs, long before modern science had pieced together dinosaur fossils and conducted analyses to produce detailed reconstructions of their appearance.
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The "ancient artworks and artifacts that appear to depict dinosaurs" being, of course, the usual crap- the Angkor Wat relief of a "stegosaurus" (which looks to me like a rhino standing in front of a tree with big leaves), a Peruvian textile with a cartoony lizard woven into it, and a French tapestry from 1500 A.D. depicting a dragon (as if we didn't know that people of that time believed in dragons). The implication is that, since these artworks are from "long before modern science had pieced together dinosaur fossils and conducted analyses to produce detailed reconstructions of their appearance," they must have been from eyewitness sightings; with, of course, no allowance made for artistic license or just plain imagination.
 
Olowkow said:
That's interesting. What field? I've never heard Microscope scientist as a job title, just "microscopist". Try googling "microscope scientist" with quotes. I mostly get "...microscope, scientist..." or "electron microscope scientist" etc.
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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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