Censored From Your Textbooks

Seems lately I'm frequently hearing from creationists arguing that various young earth evidences are censored from our textbooks. Often it's Bob Dutko, but not always. Here's a post to address several of these claims.

Bob Dutko recently interviewed Ted Rall and told him that every formerly living that has been C14 dated has "plenty" of measurable C14 still present, which is unexpected if C14 dating is reliable. It should all be pretty much gone by 50K years. But there's a reason some C14 is always showing up on the measurement equipment. The reason is that it is being made in the atmosphere all the time and cannot be entirely eliminated in the laboratory. So if a specimen is older than 20,000 years it has less C14 than is present at all times all around us. So you can't tell how much is in the specimen. You could date a piece of tin and your tools would still see some C14 because of the background radiation.

Bob went on to say that dinosaur bones were radiometrically dated via C14 methods by the University of Arizona and he has the documentation to prove it. Normally you wouldn't expect C14 to work on dinosaur bones because they are too old. He probably has in mind something like what you see here (no need to read the whole thing, just keyword search "Arizona"). If this is what he's referring to, then you can get more of the background story here. In sum creationists under false pretenses provided samples to the University of Arizona for radiometric dating. They claimed that the specimens were bones. Small amounts of contamination can radically effect the test results and these specimens were radically contaminated. All scientists involved are now in agreement that these dating results are meaningless for this reason. Additionally all indications are that the specimens were fossils, not bones. The creationists assert that these are bones, but there is no reason to think so.

Young earth creationists claim that unfossilized dinosaur bones have been found in Alaska. How can these items be at least 65 million years old when they haven't fossilized entirely? Preliminary indications are that this claim is also bogus. Some untrained creationists found a specimen they are calling a dinosaur bone and they say it isn't fossilized, but nobody else has been allowed to examine it. Give me a break.

Another is that a T-Rex specimen with soft tissue was discovered. Once again, no. Or perhaps rather than saying "no" I should say we don't know. A specimen did have something present that was able to exhibit some flexibility when hydrated and worked over, but scientists aren't sure what it is. The tissue may have been replaced in a manner not unlike fossilization by some polymer which is difficult to characterize, but which does have some properties that permit flexibility unlike typical minerals.