Originally posted by RB26DETT

An ostracod is only 5mm long and its penis can be as much as a third of the size of its entire body.

Originally posted by Nightshade
How do we know if its accurate if the only way to tell is through carbon dating...I don't buy that crap at all.

Originally posted by AcuraFanatic
Because we know the characteristics of the test and can relate them to what we find.

I hate to sound corny but it's pretty elementary.

Originally posted by /^Blackmagik^\
exactly, if you know the half-life of the carbon 14 isotope, you can determine fairly accurately how old something is by the deteriation of said isotope

Originally posted by Nightshade
How are they sure that it is accurate though...I mean they are judging this based on items much more recent than what they are using it for...so what if it is only accurate to say 100 years than the degradation process is sped up?

Science has been wrong many times before so what if this "accepted and accurate" dating system is wrong too.

Way too many questions for it to convince me.

Originally posted by Nightshade
How are they sure that it is accurate though...I mean they are judging this based on items much more recent than what they are using it for...so what if it is only accurate to say 100 years than the degradation process is sped up?

Science has been wrong many times before so what if this "accepted and accurate" dating system is wrong too.

Way too many questions for it to convince me.

Originally posted by g2tegls

Have faith. Science is a religion too.

Originally posted by Nightshade
How are they sure that it is accurate though...I mean they are judging this based on items much more recent than what they are using it for...so what if it is only accurate to say 100 years than the degradation process is sped up?

Science has been wrong many times before so what if this "accepted and accurate" dating system is wrong too.

Way too many questions for it to convince me.

Cosmic rays enter the earth's atmosphere in large numbers every day. For example, every person is hit by about half a million cosmic rays every hour. It is not uncommon for a cosmic ray to collide with an atom in the atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide with nitrogen atoms. When the neutron collides, a nitrogen-14 (seven protons, seven neutrons) atom turns into a carbon-14 atom (six protons, eight neutrons) and a hydrogen atom (one proton, zero neutrons). Carbon-14 is radioactive, with a half-life of about 5,700 years.

The carbon-14 atoms that cosmic rays create combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which plants absorb naturally and incorporate into plant fibers by photosynthesis. Animals and people eat plants and take in carbon-14 as well. The ratio of normal carbon (carbon-12) to carbon-14 in the air and in all living things at any given time is nearly constant. Maybe one in a trillion carbon atoms are carbon-14. The carbon-14 atoms are always decaying, but they are being replaced by new carbon-14 atoms at a constant rate. At this moment, your body has a certain percentage of carbon-14 atoms in it, and all living plants and animals have the same percentage.

Originally posted by /^Blackmagik^\
now that i've had a few minutes to research, i doubt that they used carbon dating to date this particular specimen, since carbon-14 has a halflife of 5700 years, carbon dating is only reliable up to 50,000 years. most likely they used potassium-40 dating which has a half life of 1.3 billion years.

here's a brief explanation fo how carbon dating works...

(from www.howstuffworks.com)

potassium-40 is created in a similar way and is found naturally in all organisms. since it's halflife is so long, potassium-40 dating is used for dating fossils that are over 50,000 years old.

Originally posted by Nightshade
Thank you this is exactly the kind of thing I was getting at...skeptics can be right sometimes

So I am assuming that potassium-40 as of now is the accepted standard until proven otherwise.

I still think 425 million years old is a bit unbelievable.