A Triceratops brow horn discovered in Dawson County, Montana, has been controversially dated to around 33,500 years, challenging the view that dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago. The finding radically suggests that early humans may have once walked the earth with the fearsome reptiles thousands of years ago.
The Triceratops brow horn was excavated in May 2012 and stored at the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum. The Museum, which has been in cooperation since 2005 with the Paleochronology Group, a team of consultants in geology, paleontology, chemistry, engineering, and education, sent a sample of the outer portion of the Triceratops brow horn to Head of the Paleochronology Group Hugh Miller, at his request, in order to carry out Carbon-14 dating. Mr Miller sent the sample to the University of Georgia, Center for Applied Isotope Studies, for this purpose.
The sample was divided at the lab into two fractions with the “bulk” or collagen break down products yielding an age of 33,570 ± 120 years and the carbonate fraction of bone bioapatite yielding an age of 41,010 ± 220 years [UGAMS-11752 & 11752a]. Mr. Miller told Ancient Origins that it is always desirable to carbon-14 date several fractions to minimize the possibility of errors, which Miller requested, and that essential concordance was achieved in the 1000’s of years as with all bone fractions of ten other dinosaurs.
Triceratops, a name meaning “three-horned face”, is a genus of herbivorous ceratopsid dinosaur that is said to have first appeared during the late Maastrichtian stage of the late Cretaceous period, about 68 million years ago in what is now North America, and became extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. However, scientists from the Paleochronology Group, who perform research relating to “anomalies of science”, maintain that dinosaurs did not die out millions of years ago and that there is substantial evidence that they were still alive as recently as 23,000 years ago.
Classical reconstruction of a Triceratops ( Wikimedia Commons )
Until recently, Carbon-14 dating was never used to test dinosaur bones, as the analysis is only reliable up to 55,000 years. Scientists never considered it worthwhile to run the test – since it is generally believed that dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years, based on radiometric dating of the volcanic layers above or below fossils, a method which the Paleochronology Group states has “serious problems and gross assumptions must be made”.
“It became clear years ago that paleontologists were not just neglecting to test dinosaur bones for C-14 content but were refusing to. Normally a good scientist will be curious about the ages of important fossil bones,” Mr. Miller told Ancient Origins in an email.
The results of the Triceratops Horn analysis are not unique. According to Mr. Miller, numerous C-14 tests have now been carried out on dinosaur bones, and surprisingly, they all returned results dating back in the thousands rather than millions of years.
“I organized the Paleochronology group in 2003 to fill a void with regards fossil wood and dinosaur bones as I was curious as to their age by C-14 dating. We thus have used C-14 dating to solve the mystery why soft tissue and dinosaur depictions exist world-wide. Our model predicted dinosaur bones would have significant C-14 and indeed they did in the range of 22,000 to 39,000 years BP.”
Sources:ancient-origins.net
