How Dating Methods "Calibrate" the Ages of Dinosaurs and Humans

1) Wrong starting assumptions and the reservoir effect

Real samples from animals show the dating clock misfiring
Dating methods are by no means an absolute clock for measuring the age of fossils. Radiometric dating looks precise, but a single environmental factor or starting condition can flip the result by thousands or even hundreds of millions of years. Living freshwater mussels dated at 2,300 years old, a freshly dead penguin dated at 800 years, a freshly dead seal dated at 1,300 years: this "reservoir effect" is clear evidence that the dating goes wrong from the start. It's said to be solved by calibration, but calibration itself only works on the premise that we don't know the starting state.

2) Isotope dating errors in rocks formed in modern times

Huge gaps between known eruption dates and measured ages
Lava from Mount St. Helens that was only about ten years old dated at 2.8 million years. 1950s lava in New Zealand dated at 3.5 million years. 1801 lava from Hawaii was dated at billions of years. Turning a newborn rock into one hundreds of millions of years old: that's the reality of dating. Some say this is just using the wrong method, but the very fact that the result changes depending on which method you choose is the heart of the problem.

3) Soft tissue and carbon-14 in ancient fossils

Blood vessels and collagen in T. rex bone, and leftover radiocarbon
Flexible blood vessels, red-blood-cell-like structures and collagen were found in Tyrannosaurus bone said to be 65 million years old, and carbon-14 equivalent to 20,000 to 40,000 years has repeatedly been detected in dinosaur bones said to be hundreds of millions of years old. Contamination or special preservation are offered as explanations, but those are interpretations added after the results. They don't prove the underlying conditions.

4) The chemical survival limit of biological molecules

Protein and DNA half-lives vs. geological ages
Proteins can survive at most about a million years, and DNA has a measured half-life of about 521 years. Finding them in dinosaur fossils is clear evidence that ages of tens of millions of years are wrong. There's a counterargument that partial preservation is possible, but there's no direct evidence that such preservation lasts that long in nature.

5) The shifting, subjective ages of human fossils

Dates revised dramatically as researchers' interpretations change
The KNM-ER 1470 skull went from 2.61 million to 1.88 million years in one stroke, a drop of 700,000 years. Other sites have been revised from over 100,000 years to just a few thousand. Human history dances by hundreds of thousands of years depending on what the discoverers think. This is called the normal process of scientific revision, but the sheer size of the revisions shows how unstable the dates are.

6) Cherry-picking measurement data

Filtering results to fit the expected numbers
Researchers choose only the methods that fit the expected age and throw out data that doesn't fit as "contaminated." That's not scientific measurement, it's choosing numbers to fit an answer already decided. One could call it filtering, but the filtering criteria themselves still depend on the hypothesis.

7) Open systems break the closed-system assumption

Groundwater, leaching and element loss in real-world samples
If groundwater washes out even 1 percent of the potassium, the date increases by millions of years. Uranium dissolves in water and leaks out easily. No sample in nature is perfectly closed. Some say cross-checking makes up for this, but that cross-checking is also done on the same assumptions.