Carbon-14 datin of ancient objects requires that material to be organic in order to assay its age. You hear someone sat that a dinosaur bone ws carbon dated to be 75 million yaers old. What are two specific reasons that this claim is incorrect?
As soon as a living organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon. The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 at the moment of death is the same as every other living thing, but the carbon-14 decays and is not replaced. The carbon-14 decays with its half-life of 5,700 years, while the amount of carbon-12 remains constant in the sample. By looking at the ratio of carbon-12 to ...
The solution explains the concept of using radioactive element carbon-14 to track the age of a piece of dinosaur bone.