Second in the series- If human victim bones are dated accurately, then why cant dinosaur bones be also?

Question

So if you think that human bones, the ones in which a person was murdered and left in a field, 20 years ago, can be dated accurately, then is it also possible, then, that this same method of dating can be used to determine the age of dinosaur bones?
Pelase click on my name for the other question, thanks.

Answer 1

Carbon dating is based on the decay of the isotope carbon-14. The rate of decay (half-life) follows a specific pattern. As it takes a certain amount of time for the carbon-14 in an object (made of carbon, like bones) to decay, scientists can measure the amount of carbon-14 in an object relative to the amount of other stable carbon isotopes to determine how long the object must have been decaying for the carbon-14 level to get as low as it has. The half-life is not affected by weather or other similar environmental factors.

One important addition: "The current maximum radiocarbon age limit lies in the range between 58,000 and 62,000 years." So, it can't really be used on dinosaur bones. Sorry.

That is a very layman's explanation, so I hope you scientific types are okay with the simplification.

Loss Leader is right, though. With dinosaurs, in most cases we are talking about only traces of the actual bones, though fossils are not necessarily completely mineralized.

Answer 2

If you date the bones of a person buried in a field for 20 years you need to take into consideration the weather and how deep they are and the soil. All of this data is available in most places..
To date something at millions of years you do not have any of the data available and even less flesh. When you start using radio carbon dating and don't know what happened to the earth in the time since then, you are having huge huge gaps in your information that are available in the murder case but not in the dino case..
You are also faced with a world flood that happened that had an effect. and also that God created the earth complete and with apparent age and this is impossible to factor in since we have no million year old scientist that kept track of things.. Too much info missing to be accurate..

Answer 3

yes but we can tell more easily for humans because of the time frame we are working in...usually no more than 100 years but within 30 avg and we know that humans existed then......with dinos we are talking about an indeterminable length of time because of the fact that there are still disputes over when they actually existed ...some say in the high tens of thousands and others will say in the millions...we dont have accurate information about that era enough to determine what would have been the density or growth based on diet and other factors (ie how big are they at birth vs adulthood, how would we know weve never seen them?) but only enough to compare to modern data...that could be like comparing apples to oranges

Answer 4

Because the longer ago it was, the harder it is. Somebody that died last year will be alot easier to give a more exact date than somebody that died 10 years ago. They have an approximate time based on the bones, but because it was so long ago, they can't get any more precise.

I'm guessing that since you have this in religion, you're trying to prove a point. But I'm bored/curious, so I'll continue anyway.

Answer 5

Not that I don't think dinosaur bones have been dated accurately.. but they don't use carbon dating on recent murder victims. Carbon dating is only for things dead for a very, very long time.

Answer 6

You realize, of course, that we have no examples of dinosaur bones. What we do have are fossils. Fossils are rocks. They are minerals that slowly replaced the bones as they decayed. Human remains are, usually, actual bones. It takes many thousands of years for bones to turn to fossils.

Even so, we have accurate ways of dating fossils. I'm not sure why you believe that fossils can't be dated.

Answer 7

yes radio carbon dating is used all of the time to date dinosaur bones and any other carbon based life form

Answer 8

Methods that work for recent bones don't work for really old bones.

What makes you think dinosaur bone dating is inaccurate? Do you mean it's less precise? Of course it would be, see my first sentence.

Answer 9

because there is a discrepancy of a mere 60 million years to a billion years. Tht is not science, tht's unadulterated speculation. Carbon dating has been proven inaccurate time and time again (no pun intended).

Answer 10

Who says they can not. Creationists?

Well remember that God is truth. Science pursues the truth. God is not a deceiver. Thus, the fossil record is correct and what science uncovers as facts are correct.