Unthinkable Radiocarbon Dates

The team of five men paddled furiously along in the wind-tossed icy waters of the Colville River in Alaska.  They had been slowly making their way through the Alaskan wilderness for almost a week, in spite of the ever-present swarms of mosquitos, quicksand, raft malfunctions, and a variety of other perils.  Some people might think they were crazy for going through all of that – even risking their lives  – just to get a few bags of old animal bones (the full account of this adventure is in The Great Alaskan Dinosaur Adventure, by Buddy Davis, Mike Liston, and John Whitmore).  However, the fossils that these men and several others collected are the centerpiece of this week’s Clue on radioisotope dating.

Hugh Miller and his team gathered samples from the fossils that these men (John Whitmore, Buddy Davis, Mike Liston, Dan Specht, and George Detwler) and others had excavated and sent them to prominent radiocarbon labs where they were blind tested, meaning that the people doing the radiocarbon dating did not know what kind of bones they are.  The people in the lab just ran the same tests they usually do in C-14 dating, even using the more advanced Accelerator Mass spectrometer (AMS) method on most of the samples.  The bones that the team from Alaska “dated” at 31,050 (± 230) years and 36,480 (±560) years.  What made this discovery so remarkable, at least in the eyes of billions-of-years advocates, is that these were not just any bones, but dinosaur bones, and the particular example above was a Hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur.  Another Hadrosaur, excavated by Joe Taylor of Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton, “dated” similarly at 37,660 (±160) years.  An Acrocanthosarus, an Allosaurus, two Triceratops, another Hadrosaur, and Apatosaurus were also dated, all coming up with comparable radiocarbon “dates” (for more information, read the article on http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html),

As I have mentioned before, unfossilized dinosaur bones have been discovered before, even by evolutionists, like Dr. Mary Schweitzer.  Old-earth advocates tried to come up with all kinds of scenarios, like bacteria, but they really don’t fit with the evidence.  However, finding radiocarbon dates of mere 10’s of thousands of years in dinosaurs, which are allegedly 65 million years old, is a blatant contradiction to the commonly held ideas about dinosaurs, the formation of geologic layers, and – at the very core – billions of years.  Old-earth advocates reverence these dating methods more than God and His Word (otherwise, why would they reject the latter to embrace the former?), so this is a huge blow to all of their fundamental ideals if they accept this evidence.  Yet, as creationists, we would expect to find a little bit of radiocarbon left in dinosaur bones because we believe that they lived in different atmospheric conditions than we do today and most of them were killed by the flood and buried rapidly in layers of sediment laid down catastrophically by the flood.  Radiocarbon dating supports the Scriptures, not contradict God’s Word.