How can we know how old fossils are?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You brought up some valid points.  There's nothing wrong with asking how scientists do things. If they have something other than divine revelation to back them up, they will welcome questions.

I may be wrong, but you seem to be proffering Noah's flood as an explanation for the apparent aged look of the rocks of the earth.  I'm no scientist, but I know they dom more than just look at a rock and decide that it looks old. Water may account for  wear and tear. However, it has nil effect on the decay of carbon 14  atomsin rocks that scientists use to date them. Your argument would hold water (pun excusable) if scientists were just looking at how old rock looks. Carbon 14 are carbon that have 14 neutrons.  

You must have at least a rudimentary understanding of carbon dating before you decide scientists don't know what they're talking about.

Actually, carbon 14 has 8 neutrons.   All carbon atoms have 6 protons.   It is the presence of exactly 6 positively charged protons in the nucleus that is responsible for defining the electron configuration of the neutral carbon atom and from that the chemical properties of carbon atom.   It is those specific chemical properties that make carbon carbon.

Different varieties of carbon atoms all have essentially the same chemical property, but their atomic nuclei have different masses.   All atomic nuclei consist of some mixture of positively charge protons and neutral neutrons of very similar mass. All carbons have 6 protons, but those with mass 14 (ie carbon 14) have 14-6=8 neutrons, while the much more common (and non-radioactive) carbon 12 have 12-6=6 neutrons.

---

There is no organic material in dinosaur fossils. They've been replaced by minerals.

Intriguingly, that does not appear to always be true.   Organic material has been recovered from Cambrian marine fossils preserved in very fine grained sedimentary rocks.   Many of the fossils of soft bodied animal forms, as well as some hard shelled arthropods, were preserved as impressions in very fine grained marine sedimentary rocks.  Many of these fossils have dark colored discoloration around them.  It has been shown these discoloration are actually a very thin layer of carbon from the original soft tissues of the animals that oozed out of as the animal’s body was compacted by the sedimentary process.

So organic material definitely can and do survive fossilization.   But much more stunning is fact that actual original soft tissue appeared to have survived inside some fossilized dinosaur bones.    Some tyrannosaur femurs were found to have only fossilized part of the way through the bone.  The interior of the bone was not only not mineralized, there were even what appeared to be extremely well preserved soft bone marrow tissue as well as blood vessels with blood cells inside in vasculated parts of the bone.  Unfortunately this was only recognized part of the way through the conservation process, by which time the conservation process, while preserving the texture and form of the soft tissue remains, destroyed any possibility of DNA recovery. 

However, there was never any possibility of carbon 14 dating because the dinosaur bones were simply too old for any meaningful analysis of carbon 14 to decay daughter element analysis.

Hair well and truly split.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Intriguingly, that does not appear to always be true.

Intriguingly, it is always and absolutely true.  There is no organic material in fossils.  Fossils are organic materials that have been replaced by minerals.  Very rarely, organic material is found encased within fossils or near fossils or on fossils, but not in the fossils themselves.

And that, my friend, is how you split hairs. 

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I've never heard of carbon being referred to as "tissue".

[Anomalocaris]

Intriguingly, that does not appear to always be true.

Intriguingly, it is always and absolutely true.  There is no organic material in fossils.  Fossils are organic materials that have been replaced by minerals.  Very rarely, organic material is found encased within fossils or near fossils or on fossils, but not in the fossils themselves.

And that, my friend, is how you split hairs. 

Boru

Well, sir, the hair remains unsplit

You see, in the tyrannosaurs femur in question, the unmineralized, original soft tissue material is completely enclosed inside mineralized fossil bone.    Thus there is organic material in the fossil, in much the same way as there is candy in the box.

---

I've never heard of carbon being referred to as "tissue".

What is in the tyrannosaur femur is much more than just carbon.   The material is soft and elastic, and form branching tubular structure inside the vascular parts of the bone just like the blood vessels, and even have remains of blood cells inside.  

The soft tissue remains extracted from tyrannosaur fossil proved sufficiently chemically well preserved, despite destruction of any possible remaining DNA, that proteins remarkably similar to those which are unique to birds were identified in it.  Given the extremely close evolutionary relationship between the tyrannosaurs branch of the dinosaurs lineage and avian birds, this is additional evidence the soft organic material found inside the dinosaur bone fossil is the original tissue from the dinosaur, and not some later organic contaminant that somehow got inside the fossilized bone.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yeah, and there are minerals that act just like that. This has been debunked thoroughly.

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah, and there are minerals that act just like that. This has been debunked thoroughly.

Yeah?  which mineral produce specifically bird like proteins?

The preservation of soft tissue with their original structures, not just the tissue proteins, inside dinosaur bone fossils aroused controversy, but is hardly debunked.  Peer reviewed papers were published in just the last year concerning the mechanism of preservation of original soft organic tissue structure inside fossilized bones in journal of the Society of vertebrate paleontology.

[Peebothuhlu]

? Anomalocaris ?

There was/has been no 'Soft tissue' found in dino bones.

I think (Running off memory. Will try and find a link or such) that the best they've found is, effectivly, 'Rust'.
As in the litteral elements left over from hemoglobin.
If you find a different link first, that'd be great.


Cheers.

EDIT: Here's a couple of links I found talking about the issue.







 Here's another one further explaining the paper by the scientist.





 Sorry they're some folks youtubes. Best I could do atm.


Cheers.

Not at work.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Have fun with that, y'all.

[Anomalocaris]

? Anomalocaris ?

There was/has been no 'Soft tissue' found in dino bones.

I think (Running off memory. Will try and find a link or such) that the best they've found is, effectivly, 'Rust'.
As in the litteral elements left over from hemoglobin.
If you find a different link first, that'd be great.


Cheers.

EDIT: Here's a couple of links I found talking about the issue.







 Here's another one further explaining the paper by the scientist.





 Sorry they're some folks youtubes. Best I could do atm.


Cheers.

Not at work.

Uh, no.  There was soft tissue.  

When this was first reported, various explanation were provided to the effect that what looked like structured soft tissue inside the bone was in fact organic mats laid down by recent bacterial contamination. But that explanation took a hit when proteins normally only found in birds were isolated from the tissues. The resistance to accepting real dinosaur tissue might actually survive entombed in fossils stems from the conviction that complex protein in real soft tissue would inevitably chemically degrade over hundreds of thousands of years,  far less than the age of the dinosaur fossil.    

However subsequently it was shown that under some preservation conditions where remnants of hemoglobins are preserved with the tissues in parts of fossil sealed from the entombing sediments, hemoglobin release free radicals that cause amino acids in the proteins of surrounding tissues to form cross linked chains in exactly the same way as formaldehyde would, which allow the altered proteins and soft tissue to resist chemical degradation on time scale of hundreds of millions of years exactly as formaldehyde would.

So the preservation of soft tissue over hundreds of millions of years does have a plausible mechanism, and is no longer as mysterious or as incredible as it had seemed when first instances were reported about 15 years ago.

[popeyespappy]

Paper from last year on this.

Fossilization transforms vertebrate hard tissue proteins into N-heterocyclic polymers