Curious. I'm no creationist. But would like to argue against one.
How accurate is carbon dating these extinct dinosaurs
The info I'm finding is 5370 years. Give or take 40 years..doesn't seem right when one in Alberta was recently found and estimated at 80million years

The 5370 is the half-life of the isotope, meaning every 5370 years it decays by half of its current state

Dinosaur fossils are not dated with carbon isotopes but with others, from what i found like uranium, which have much larger half-lives, in the hundreds of millions of years

It's accurate to within something like 250 thousand years. After that there's too little C14 to accurately measure.

Yes, they use uranium for dinosaur bones. Carbon dating is done for human artifacts because they are fairly recent. Uranium isn't naturally found in bones, obviously, so they have to find rock deposits that do and estimate bone age by proximity to such rock and what layers the bones were found in, etc.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thanks for replies from everyone. Very informative.

One problem with this method is that we do not know for sure that the rock deposit proximity indicates similar age. We assume that.

So, to say with certainty that a dinosaur is x millions of years old is merely an informed guesstimate.

And to date we have not found fossils that don't line up with our current idea of the biological timeline. Meaning, we haven't found any 2000 year old dinosaurs and we haven't found any 60 million year old humans.

True, but we've done it so many times and have several other lines of dating that all agree so there's more than enough evidence this method is accurate to date fossils.

yes c14 dating is accurate to about 50k years, no you will never be able to argue that point with a creationist, they will take the dating method and apply it to all sorts of ridiculous situations (kent hovind likes to use it on living animals and wonder why its wrong), so why are you trying to argue science with someone who doesn't believe in science (or at least thinks it's subjective and irrelevant) exactly?

e: oh and something about polonium halo's which are magical pixies that live in uranium and only appear when creationist with no credentials do the experiment and absolutely refuse to show up for anyone else.

This post was edited by dude_927 on Dec 1 2014 03:14am