Re: Wyoming rancher spoofs dating lab?

In article
<bwbadeno-711BDB.21273504092006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Brian Badenoch <bwbadeno@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A fundamentalist emailed me the following as part of a discussion we
are having.

A Rancher in Wyo buried a sheep 20 yrs ago and for a kick, dug it up and
sent
it in for carbon dating. ....It came back that it was several million years
old!

I explained that the story was garbled at best, and I expressed my
skepticism. He replied:

Brian I might have mistated the years on the carbon dating...in honesty, I
don't remember the exact years, but I knew the rancher and when I attended
the University of Wyo, it was kind of the laugh on campus.


(I'm not at all sure about when this took place. We are in out 60's, so
if he attended college at a normal age, the dating would have been in
the 1960's, and the "ago" in the first quote is a mistake.)

Does anybody have any information on this incident?

Brian

Well, the date could not have come back as "several million years old".
Radiocarbon dating only works back as far as 60,000 years ± 2,000 years.
Beyond that, too much of the C14 has decayed to be able to measure the
remainder. And it only works reliably for things older than 350 years:
not enough C14 has decayed and atmospheric nuclear weapons tests have
changed the concentrations of C14 that living things take up.

How much did the rancher pay for the radiocarbon dating? What laboratory
did he send the sample to? When did the rancher actually do this? In the
1960s? Radiocarbon dating had only been invented in the '50s, and the
techniques and calibrations were not as good back then as they are now.

--
Timberwoof <me at timberwoof dot com> http://www.timberwoof.com
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Study Re-evaluates Evolution of Mammals
    ... Just look at how well C14 results that were "concrete" have just been ... radiocarbon dating is no good beyond 50 000. ... to fossils where all the carbon has been replace by other minerals. ... derdag so stipulates that derdag isn't accurate about methods of C14 ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Carbon-14 fallacy in dating
    ... C14 are not reliable anyway, ... "Why did it start with no C-14, when it had, apparently, lots of all ... "C-14 dating is calibrated using tree-ring dates back to over 8,000 ... and the necessary correction amounts to only a few ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Study Re-evaluates Evolution of Mammals
    ... Just look at how well C14 results that were "concrete" have just been ... C14 dating due to this, ... how much carbon-14 you have to begin with, after 5760 years half of it ... Derdag, if in fact you 'learned enough' about C14 to critically ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Study Re-evaluates Evolution of Mammals
    ... immediately clear the way for the rise of today's mammals. ... I learned enough about it to see that my position on C14 hasn't ... C14 dating due to this, ... Recalibration of radiocarbon dating has been going on for decades. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Fooling radiocarbon dating
    ... In radiocarbon dating, how exactly is the carbon baseline determined ... As for contamination from other sources, well, ... to this of C14 but betas inherently don't have a sharp spectrum so ... on decay counting but on accelerator mass spectroscopy where you ...
    (sci.physics)