A Triceratops brow horn discovered in Dawson County, Montana, has been controversially dated to around 33,500 years, challenging the view that dinosaurs ԀiҽԀ out around 65 million years ago. The finding radically suggests that early humans may have once walked the earth with fearsome reptiles thousands of years ago.
The Triceratops brow horn was excavated by palaeontologist Otis Kline Jr, microscope scientist Mark Armitage, and microbiologist and avocational palaeontologist Kevin Anderson, in May 2012, and two horn samples (GDFM 12.001a and GDFM 12.001b) were given to the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Montana.
The samples were then sent to the University of Georgia, Center for Applied Isotope Studies for Carbon-14 dating, which yielded an estimated date of 33,570 ± 120 years for the first sample and 41,010 ± 220 years for the second.
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, a team of consultants in geology, palaeontology, chemistry, engineering, and education, who perform research relating to “anomalies of science”, maintain that dinosaurs did not Ԁiҽ out millions of years ago and that there is substantial evidence that they were still alive as recently as 23,000 years ago.
Clᴀssical reconstruction of a Triceratops
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 ᴀssumptions must be made”.
“It became clear years ago that palaeontologists 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,” Hugh Miller, a research and consulting chemist and Head of the Paleochronology Group, 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.
