CANNER
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muckyman
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|  Subject: Re: Soft-tissue dinosaur biological material  Fri Jan 02, 2015 7:08 pm | |
| Jurassic park is getting closer.  | |
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CANNER
Moderator
Posts : 7017
Join date : 2013-04-30
| | Subject: Re: Soft-tissue dinosaur biological material Fri Jan 02, 2015 8:23 pm | |
| Maybe dinosaurs aren't really from that long ago. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] - Quote :
- carbon-14 dating won't work on dinosaur bones. The half-life of carbon-14 is only 5,730 years, so carbon-14 dating is only effective on samples that are less than 50,000 years old. Dinosaur bones, on the other hand, are millions of years old -- some fossils are billions of years old. To determine the ages of these specimens, scientists need an isotope with a very long half-life. Some of the isotopes used for this purpose are uranium-238, uranium-235 and potassium-40, each of which has a half-life of more than a million years.Unfortunately, these elements don't exist in dinosaur fossils themselves. Each of them typically exists in igneous rock, or rock made from cooled magma. Fossils, however, form in sedimentary rock -- sediment quickly covers a dinosaur's body, and the sediment and the bones gradually turn into rock. But this sediment doesn't typically include the necessary isotopes in measurable amounts.
So beyond 50000 years ago it actually is more of a guess to what age the bones truly are.  [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] | |
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| | Subject: Re: Soft-tissue dinosaur biological material | |
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