Dinosaurs in Paradise - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 156

tion to the amount in the atmosphere. The atmospheric ratio of 14 C to 12 C is maintained in
living things that continually incorporate new carbon into their bodies. But after they die,
the 14 C no longer gets refreshed and starts to decay exponentially—at a rate proportional
to the amount left. Libby reasoned that if one knew the half-life of 14 C, one could tell how
long decay had been going on by measuring the present rate of decay.
He tested the technique by dating wood from samples with a range of independently
known ages. The youngest came from a piece of Douglas fir cut down in 623 AD. Others
included the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy dating from the third century BC , the in-
ner rings of an almost three-thousand-year-old redwood tree, deck boards from the funer-
ary barge of an Egyptian pharaoh who died around 1843 BC , and wood from a pair of five-
thousand-year-old tombs. The ages predicted by radiocarbon dating closely agreed with the
known ages of the samples. Radiocarbon dating worked.
Its application to woolly mammoth carcasses presented a serious problem for champions
of flood geology. Carbon dating showed that mammoth carcasses range from more than
forty thousand to less than ten thousand years old, disproving the single catastrophe theory.
Mammoths did not all die at once.
How did evangelicals respond to these findings? Many accepted radiometric dating, the
idea of an old Earth, and the possibility of a regional flood. But those fundamentalists com-
mitted to flood geology and a young Earth responded not with facts or a reinterpretation of
scripture; they simply refused to believe it.
This didn't solve their mammoth problem. Studies of individual mammoth carcasses re-
vealed that mammoths did not all drown, as they surely would have in a global flood. Some
died in the old-elephant death position, down on the stomach with legs stretched out in
front. Others sank through the permafrost, fell into collapse pits, or got stuck in swampy
ground, unable to extract their bulk from the mire. Mosses, grasses, and herbs found in
mammoth stomachs were characteristic of the vegetation growing within a few hundred
kilometers of their carcasses. There was no need to invoke a global flood to deliver them
from the tropics. Mammoths lived and died close to where their remains were found.
None of the arguments for asserting that mammoths died in a great catastrophe survived
twentieth-century scrutiny. Creationists didn't seem to notice.