carbon 14 dating fossils

Why is carbon-14 dating not used for dating dinosaur bones/fossils?

Please just facts on why it cannot be used for dating dinosaur bones/fossils.

Two reasons:

1. As others have said, carbon dating can only go back so far. The half-life of carbon-14 is about 5,700 years, which makes it only accurate for dating objects to about 60,000 years old. Anything older than that has too little carbon-14 left to get an accurate reading.

2. Carbon dating only works on once-living tissue. (It is based on the fact that living things take on carbon atoms from the atmosphere while they are alive, but stop taking on new carbon atoms when they die … whereupon the carbon-14 decays away at a known rate.) Fossils are not once-living tissue. Fossils are not bones. Fossils are made of the rock that fills in the impressions left by bones that have decayed away.

For these reasons, we use other forms of radiometric dating (not carbon dating) for fossils and rocks.

14. Carbon Dating 1 . Fossils . Radiometric Dating . Nitrogen . Uranium . [DVD 7, 39:43-49:43]

radiocarbon dating fossils

How can we be sure of the age of extremely old fossils? Radiocarbon dating is only accurate to 60,000 years?

I asked in this question how scientists knew that Amoebas evolved 2 billion years after the earliest life forms:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Arn1WLXeBYEYtFm7k1NO7VPsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20070910134244AAEVHks

Alot of the answers said it was from fossil evidence…

But I have to ask how are these fossils dated? Is it Carbon-14 dating? Because we’re talking about fossils supposedly billions of years old… how do we know this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Computation_of_ages_and_dates

Well, we are never sure. We just have the best conclusion we can draw from the evidence.

There are other forms of dating that work well beyond the age at which C-14 dating no longer works.

Below is a really good article about radiometeric dating.

I think that some of the evidence about fossil evolution comes from molecular clock data: that is, we use fossils and DNA to tell us how long it takes to accumulate a certain number of DNA changes, and then we figure out how many relavent changes there are between amoebas and other organisms, and we extrapolate how long ago the last common ancestor was.

Evidence of evolution from fossil record

radiometric dating christian perspective

Re: flaws of evolution

isotopic age dating methods

Geological Research with Dr. Leon Long