Many times I have been asked about Carbon-14 dating and how does it help biblical creation studies, especially dating fossils including dinosaur bones. Well, even if you use long-age evolutionary and not Young Earth Creation assumptions all Carbon-14/Carbon-12 measurements always give ages for all Carbon bearing samples less than 50,000 years BP (before present), and for dinosaurs less than 40,000 years BP. That is a long cry from 20 to 100 million years, the putative ages for the formation of the minerals and fossils, and particularly the age of the dinosaurs. It therefore refutes the Old Earth paradigm another scripted lie in the modern age.
The following is not my work but reproduced in part from newgeology.us. Please go there to read the full very extensive report. The dates given below are those determined by secular labs from the measured Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio using the standard Old Earth assumptions.
I have placed the data, including pdf’s of original laboratory reports you can download, at the top of the page for people who are in a hurry. And yes, it was dinosaur bones that were tested, not petrified fossils (replaced with minerals and turned to stone). You can read what lab technicians said about processing the bone samples. Published reports by Dr. Mary Schweitzer and others since 2007 confirmed the survival of original dinosaur tissue, as explained below. That fact has not yet trickled down to grade school teaching, where armchair critics of this work seem to have gotten all their information.
The preservation of dinosaur soft tissue and DNA fragments points to dinosaur bones being tens of thousands, not tens of millions, years old, contradicting the geologic time scale. So do the Carbon-14 tests:
The Data: Carbon-14 in dinosaur bones
None of the above samples were obtained from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and none had been coated with shellac.
(a) Acro (Acrocanthosaurus) is a carnivorous dinosaur excavated in 1984 near Glen Rose TX by C. Baugh and G. Detwiler; in 108 MA Cretaceous sandstone – identified by Dr. W. Langston of Un. of TX at Austin.
Allosaurus is a carnivorous dinosaur excavated in 1989 by the J. Hall, A. Murray team. It was found under an Apatosaurus skeleton in the Wildwood section of a ranch west of Grand Junction CO in 150 Ma (late Jurassic) sandstone of the Morrison formation.
Hadrosaur #1, a duck billed dinosaur. Bone fragments were excavated in 1994 along Colville River by G. Detwiler, J. Whitmore team in the famous Liscomb bone bed of the Alaskan North Slope – validated by Dr. J. Whitmore.
Hadrosaur #2, a duck billed dinosaur. A lone femur bone was excavated in 2004 in clay in the NW 1/4, NE 1/4 of Sec. 32, T16N, R56 E, Dawson County, Montana by the O. Kline team of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum. It was sawed open by the O. Kline, H. Miller team in 2005 to retrieve samples for C-14 testing.
Triceratops #1, a ceratopsid dinosaur. A lone femur bone was excavated in 2004 in Cretaceous clay at 47 6 18N by 104 39 22W in Montana by the O. Kline team of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum. It was sawed open by the O. Kline, H. Miller team in 2005 to retrieve samples for C-14 testing.
Triceratops #2, a very large ceratopsid-type dinosaur excavated in 2007 in Cretaceous clay at 47 02 44N and 104 32 49W in Montana by the O. Kline team of Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum. Outer bone fragments of a femur were tested for C-14.
Hadrosaur #3, a duck billed dinosaur. Scrapings were taken from a large bone excavated by Joe Taylor of Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, Crosbyton TX in Colorado in Cretaceous strata.
Apatosaur, a sauropod. Scrapings were taken from a rib still imbedded in the clay soil of a ranch in CO, partially excavated in 2007 and 2009, in 150 Ma (late Jurassic) strata by C. Baugh and B. Dunkel.
(b) GX is Geochron Labs, Cambridge MA, USA; AA is University of Arizona, Tuscon AZ, USA; UG is University of Georgia, Athens GA, USA; KIA is Christian Albrechts Universitat, Kiel Germany.
(c) AMS is Accelerator Mass Spectrometry; Beta is the conventional method of counting Beta decay particles.
(d) Bio is the carbonate fraction of bioapatite. Bow is the bulk organic fraction of whole bone; Col is collagen fraction; w or ext is charred, exterior or whole bone fragments; Hum is humic acids.
Bioapatite is a major component of the mineralised part of bones. It incorporates a small amount of carbonate as a substitute for phosphate in the crystal lattice.
Charred bone is the description given by lab personnel for blackened bone surfaces.
Collagen is the main protein found in the connective tissue of animals, making up from 1 to 6 percent of muscle mass. It can be as high as 20% in normal bone but decomposes over time so that there should be none after ~100,000 years. Yet it is found in four-foot long, nine-inch diameter dinosaur femur bones claimed to be greater than 65 million years old. The “Modified Longin Method” is the normal purification method for bone collagen. Dr. Libby, the discoverer of Radiocarbon dating and Nobel Prize winner, showed that purified collagen could not give erroneous ages.
View laboratory reports: UGAMS-9891,9893 UGAMS-8824 UGAMS-7509a/b UGAMS-11752,a UGAMS-04973a UGAMS-02947 UGAMS-03228a,b UGAMS-01935/01936/01937 GX-32678 GX-32739 GX-32372 GX-32647 GX-15155-A,-A-AMS AA-5786
Other researchers should attempt to replicate these results, as two did in 2015. This is from their data table:
Data from page 301 of: Thomas, Brian, Vance Nelson. Spring 2015. Radiocarbon in Dinosaur and Other Fossils. Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 299-311
A similar result (24,600 years BP) was obtained for a Mosasaur in 2011. Lindgren J, Uvdal P, Engdahl A, Lee A H, Alwmark C, Bergquist K E, Nilsson E, Ekström P, Rasmussen M, Douglas D A, Polcyn M J, Jacobs L L (2011). Microspectroscopic Evidence of Cretaceous Bone Proteins. PLoS ONE 6(4): e19445 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0019445
All dinosaur remains ever dated with the Carbon-14 method result in ages of thousands not millions of years. This is totally consistent with the Young Earth timeline from the Bible.
Related Reading
- Carbon-14 In Diamonds Not Refuted
- Can Earth’s Magnetic Field Survive for Billions of Years?
- Coal, the Creator’s Providential Provision
- Abiogenic Deep Origin of Hydrocarbons: Not Fossils But Primordial
- Earth’s Magnetic Field: A Shield by Design
- Doesn’t Radiometric Dating Prove That the Earth is Billions of Years Old?
- 8 Reasons Why Evolution is Foolish
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