real life saidQuote: When a rock or fossil is being dated for instance, if the date returned is not found to be in the expected range, do they toss out that date?
When you say dated, Im assuming that you are stating that this is the specific goal of the exerxcise.
If a fossil is taken form Devonian Rocks, we dont usually do dating, since we know the Era of the sedimentary unit from years of correlation data. We usually look at environmentas of deposition. If its an unknown, we will often (but not always) subject a fossil to a set of multiple types of dating techniques, (Thermo, various isotopes, magnetic reversal stratigraphy, polar isochrons, alpha decay tracking etc etc)
We dont toss out data, because the labs have no association with the scientists. They have a strict QA program that requires their calibration data, field trip data, sample data is properly recorded and the report filed. To "toss it out" any data is to commit fraud
If a C14 data is out of the range, we usually always identify it and include the data in the set as an explained (or unexplained outlyer). Often we will rerun it or resample or evaluate why the dates dont jibe with the others in the multiple sets.
(SHroud of Turin had recent bacteria that made the date appear much younger than it was suspe cted)
We dont grab at one form of age dating and rely upon it exclusively because environmental conditions can vary carbon isotope ratios , and the fact that "resetting the C14 clock by recent nuke testing has caused the decay constants to be recalculated periodically.
AS I recall, we had this discussion before and I answered pretty much that "tossing" data will be the first step of ruining a career.You can read about people whove fudged their data and were later found out. Most of them now work for the .... (Disc...), naaah I wont say it, its too easy.
Why a scientist would call for an analysis like C14 which can cost about 1500$ per sample, when the scientist knows which rock unit hosted the fossil, is a mystery to me. If we find Miocene sharks teeth and they are in the NAnjemoy formation in a means that cannot be explained we wouldnt usually use C14 because its half life runs out about 1000 times earlier than the formation we are looking at. Wed look at deposition first, is there some context that shows that the fossil was a later addition by scouring pits in the earlier sediments and the fossil was found in those pits, that would make the case better.
Often, sedimentary and stratigraphic analyses are more subject to the principles of Murphy"s Law than of Hutton's. We always have
to be aware of the special conditions that occur in any insitu sequence.
You have an appealing manner in which your interests in this subject have a naive tendency to oversimplify how analyses and field work are actually done. There are actually ASTM standards on radionuclide sampling and decay analyses, and the boring detail that governs how an expedition is mounted and how funding is secured would make your eyes glaze. There are hundreds of expeditions that go out and find Nothing in their main areas of inquiry so when they do find something, they are not so "empty headed" as to forget the principles of multiple sources of corroboration, detailed associate scientific evidence and constant checking, checking , and rechecking.If they do, their future desires for funding will go unanswered. I for one, could never be a paleontologist , either vert or invert. You can go through an entire career bathed in the light of discoveries going on all around you and being only a minor player in the detailed statistical scutwork that science lives 90% of its life.
