Triassic wood from Australia was dated at 33K years old

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 Links 6 References 7 Related claims 8 See Also 9 Acknowledgments

[edit] Claim

A piece of wood is fossilized in the Hawkesbury Sandstone, Australia, which most geologists date to the middle Triassic, about 225 to 230 million years ago. The wood was dated by Geochron (a commercial dating laboratory) using the C14 dating method. They determined its age to be only 33,720 +/- 430 years before present. Contamination by recent microbes or fungi cannot explain the discrepant age.

[edit] Source

• Snelling, Andrew, 1999. Dating Dilemma: Fossil wood in 'ancient' sandstone. Creation Ex Nihilo 21(3): 39-41. [1]

[edit] Responses

1. Given as how C14 dating techniques are used only with organic substances less than 50,000 years old, it is to be expected that one will get an inaccurate result when one attempts to date 250+ million year old wood that has no original carbon 14 isotopes in it with this method.
2. Given as how the sample was porous, it may have been contaminated by organic carbon via groundwater seepage.
3. Creationists who use this claim fail to realize that 33+ thousand years also contradicts the claim that the world is only 6 to 10 thousand years old.
4. add more responses

[edit] Fallacies contained in this claim

• Hasty Generalization (the fact that a method is unreliable when misapplied does not mean that it is always unreliable.)
• Exclusion (the fact that carbon-dating is only used for organic substances younger than 50,000 years and older than 30 years is conveniently ignored.)

[edit] Links

• Meert, Joe, 2003. Andrew Snelling and the Iron Concretion? [2] (Includes a letter from GeoChron labs saying that the "wood" looked like an iron concretion)
• Mark Isaak's page for this claim [3]

[edit] References

1. Hunt, Kathleen, 2002. Carbon-14 in Coal Deposits. [4]
2. Reesman, Dick, 2000. Personal communication.

[edit] Related claims

• Carbon dating gives inaccurate results
• Variable C14/C12 ratio invalidates C14 dating
• Vollosovitch and Dima mammoths yielded inconsistent C14 dates
• Living snails were C14 dated at 2,300 and 27,000 years old
• Ancient oil is C14 dated as only 50,000 years old

[edit] See Also

• Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?
• Radiometric dating

[edit] Acknowledgments