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Posted by: werdnaz
The problem with carbon-dating is it detects the age of a carbon sample, not the age of the animal it inhabited. Also carbon-dating assumes that all isotopes of nitrogen formed in beta-decay were only formed from such decay, whearas it is unlikely that no nitrogen existed before decay.
Carbon dating is not the primary tool to determine age. Multiple radioactive samples are measured to determine the age of a rock layer, which is only confirmed after the measurements of multiple materials all indicate the same timeframe. As for fossils, stratigraphy, not radioactive dating, is used to give the timeframe from within the fossil must have formed in.