"I'm the Baby....Gotta Love Me"
Being interested in dinosaurs when I was younger, naturally some of my favorite TV shows had dinosaurs in them (not all shows…I wasn’t that bad). Personally my favorite show was Dinosaurs, which most may not heard of (but if you have you probably recognize the title of this entry as a popular quote from it). It was early 90’s and one of the first shows to use animatronics. But there were others……..an old television show called Land of the Lost or the classic that everyone has heard of………the Flintstones. Then you have all the movies…old ones like One Million Years B.C. and King Kong (ok new with the emake)…and books turned into movies like The Lost World and of course who can forget Jurassic Park. Now I’m sure if you’ve watched or read any these, it’s obvious that all of them have to deal with humans and dinosaurs interacting. It’s always been an appealing to imagine dinosaurs walking among us ever since the first dinosaurs were discovered. Either the dinosaurs were around when people first came about, like with the Flintstones, Dinosaurs, or One Million B.C. or if somehow dinosaurs still live in some unknown area of the world like in King Kong or Lost World. Whether or not it was thought to be true at the time or it was meant purely as fiction it still made people hope for dinosaurs to still be around. Could it be possible that they still roam around now or did we at least walk the earth with them at some point in the past? Now I don’t know how many people would look at this question, laugh at it and say that it is ridiculous for it to be possible but for any of those who believe the Lock Ness Monster exists or who believes literally in the Bible, the question is not so ridiculous. And for that sake it should be taken seriously. So to start we deal with the question when did dinosaurs exist and when did humans arrive? But the answers could be 6,000 years ago for both, according to Creationists or 65 millions years ago for dinosaurs and around 4 million years for people according to scientists. But how can scientists get values that are so different than what Creationists believe. Well this brings what I am convinced to be the biggest controversy that has to do with evolution and one that is much to big to be dealt with in only one entry: radiometric dating.
Ok so radiometric dating in a nutshell. By far most nuclei of atoms are perfectly stable but there are some, of which I will describe later, that aren’t and so try to become stable. The atom either ejects or captures particles, which turns it into another element. From there it either becomes stable or goes through the process over and over until it does become stable. Now let’s take a bigger sample. It is impossible to tell exactly when any individual atom will decay because any one of them could decay at any given time. Now if there are a few atoms then they all decay at random unpredictable times, but in a sample there are countless billions of atoms so just by chance alone, the atoms will decay at a steady constant rate. It’s just like flipping a coin. We all know that it’s a 50/50 chance to get either heads or tails. But if you ever actually tried flipping a coin, that doesn’t happen too often. I just now flipped a penny 30 times and actually got tails 20 of those times. But the more times you flip the coin the closer it gets to 50/50. It shouldn’t actually hit 50% exactly but after enough time it will come within a small margin of error and stay there. Unstable elements do the same thing. The time an element takes to decay is measured by its half life, or the length it takes for half of the element to decay. So if an element has a 1-year half life, ½ will be left after one year, ¼, or half of what’s left, will be left after two years, 1/8 after three years, 1/16 after four, and so on. So based on this you can tell how old something is just based on how many atoms have changed.
By far the best known and most controversial radiometric dating is carbon dating. The way it starts is when gamma rays from the sun hit nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere. A reaction occurs and a proton goes flying off. 14C is left behind, which is a regular carbon atom with two additional neutrons. It then travels down to earth in the form of carbon dioxide where of it enters into plants and then animals. The 14C is replenished throughout the animal or plants life and then upon death, the carbon begins to decay. The 14C actually decays when a neutron breaks up into a proton, an electron, an anti-neutrino turning it back into a nitrogen atom. As it decays 14C has a half-life of 5,730 years.
So what’s so important about carbon dating? Well it can be used in anything that has living tissue left, which means anything that hasn’t fossilized yet, which actually take millions of years. Most importantly however is that it can be found in large amounts, which is very important when it comes to dating. So if this is so great what’s wrong with it? Well first is that the amount of 14C in the atmosphere never stays constant over time which changes the date by quite a bit. Then you have cases where animals just killed give a carbon dating of thousands of years old, ancient deposits of coal are only thousands of years old, different parts of mammoths are dated thousands of years apart, or a case that brings us right to my original question…a dinosaur bone found with living tissue. Well once you hear about enough of these examples you start to wonder about how valid it really is and let me add that when I did look into these, the examples are not outright lies. But let’s go through them. The animal just killed, a seal in the example I saw, tested to be 1000 years old. Well most marine animals tested by carbon dating are thrown out because of what’s called a reservoir effect where older carbon from the surrounding water mixes in with the animal and makes it appear older. Then the coal, where the tested carbon easily could have been put there by several ways including bacteria or groundwater. The mammoth, which in a classic example I found, was dated to be 29,500 and 44,000 years old. For any similar animal that was found like this the problem usually comes that the bones are rarely ever already assembled when found and are usually from different animals that lived thousands of years apart. Or there was contamination at a point and the date has to be thrown out. In this case part of the mammoth was soaked in glycerin which gave that part a date of 29,500 years. For the dinosaur the reports apparently turn out to be slightly over-exaggerated. While tissue was found, it was fossilized and from what was there it is unknown to exactly what animal it came from.
From the examples I have found there seems to be a common theme, either they were over-exaggerated or the fossils have been contaminated at some point, and many are thrown out by scientists. As with anything else, carbon dating isn’t perfect but it has been tested on items from which we already know the date and they do match. And the examples that I have come across seem to be misunderstandings, over-exaggerations, or cases that have been already thrown out because of contamination. At least to me any argument that uses a case like this loses a lot of credibility when it can be shown that it comes from either a misunderstanding or from intentionally misleading. But even beyond these examples there are skeptics and I can understand why. How do we know that carbon dating is steady and doesn’t become accurate beyond those dates we can already measure? How bout when 14C levels change over time…like how I stated earlier or by any other method? Just because we can date things back hundreds or a couple thousands years doesn’t mean something can’t happen beyond that which can raise the possibility that we do live on a younger earth and that we do or have lived with dinosaurs. Well there is a way we can find out for sure which I will show in my next entry: part two of radiometric dating.
Comments
Posted by: Nicole
Posted on: October 26, 2006 08:46 PM
I loved Dinosaurs when I was younger. I come across it on DVD in the store every once in awhile and have to struggle with myself not to pick it up immediately.