I agree with Andréa, not just because of the pun. The cartoon science just doesn’t work: radiocarbon dating is good for only 30 to (at best) 50 thousand years, so it is useless on dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the joke could have been saved by making the couple older, to put them in the “Carboniferous” period (approx. 300 to 350 million years ago).
Carbon dating is perfectly fine for dinosaurs. I have some dinosaur in the fridge right now they could work on if they wanted. :p
There’s far worse* scientific crimes here than calling all radiometric dating ‘carbon dating’… Non-avian dinosaurs at 120 mya (45 million years after the last nads went extinct), any dinosaur with that posture aside from therizinosaurs (which those obviously ain’t) – and even they wouldn’t have bent their tails like that – actually, literally everything about the anatomy is so genericized as to be incomprehensible, and, honestly, points away from dinosauria, or any other sort of reptile.
* Well, worse to my mind…chronologists or chronology nerds will probably have different priorities.
… Shit, why do I keep doing that. 65 is not 165. Why brain, why? I know that’s wrong, and yet it always pops up! And why do you always do that when I’m being pompously nitpicky? >_<
Now I’m wondering if Kamino Neko is actually Abby Howard or Kory Bing.
On top of the dating problem, tar pits, at least in my mind, are associated with the late Pleistocene/early Holocene (i.e. mammals). Or do tar pits eventually turn into oil shales or something?
I thought it was cute. @Kilby (1) – I’m impressed that at the range of knowledge you had at hand that worked together to spoil the joke for you. Sometimes a fossil is just a fossil.
It is a fossil of a joke, of course. I was walking on the college campus and many beautiful coeds ran up to me and said they wanted to date me. Unfortunately, it was carbon date me.
Likewise, every night, a group of beautiful coeds spend all night at my front door, knocking and screaming. Unfortunately, the police keep coming and letting them out.
Just to add to some of the criticisms already made…
The whole “tar pits” thing is a reference to the the La Brea Tar Pits, which did not exist until about 40,000 years ago. It was an unusual thing: tar pits were not generally spread all over the Pleistocene. More generically, the term “predator trap” is sometimes used to describe similar phenomena whereby prey and predators are trapped and die. There are examples of this in the dinosaur record, but I don’t know of any that were tar pits (quick sand, perhaps).
While with special handling and processing, radiocarbon dating may be used for objects as old as 70,000 years, that still doesn’t get us anywhere near the Early Cretaceous. And while the early mammals that emerged in that period are inevitably referred to as “rodent-like” or “rat-like,” the first true rodents did not appear until after the mass extinction that marked the end of the (non-avian) dinosaurs some 65-million years ago.
So, in short, carbon dating is useless for 120-million-year-old fossils, and at the time these creatures supposedly lived, there would be no rodents for them to munch on, and the La Brea Tar Pits would still be about 120 million years in the future.
@ Catlover – I didn’t mean to imply that the cartoon had no value. I was smiling as I groaned. I actually had just one piece of information, and another piece of misinformation, which led me to look up the other one. Ja is correct that carbon dating can now go beyond 50,000 years, but besides requiring special techniques, it is also limited to certain types of samples. There was once a time when the effective upper limit was circa 30k.
The reason I ended up with the dates for “carboniferous” is that I was checking the name. In German, this period is actually called “Karbon“, and I was hoping that the English title would be a perfect cognate.
To jump on the bandwagon of scientific criticism: I doubt that dinosaurs even went on dates, and even if they did, they’d be unlikely to hold hands or go on long walks during them.
At least they weren’t Carnotaurus, who COULDN’T hold hands.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I agree with Andréa, not just because of the pun. The cartoon science just doesn’t work: radiocarbon dating is good for only 30 to (at best) 50 thousand years, so it is useless on dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the joke could have been saved by making the couple older, to put them in the “Carboniferous” period (approx. 300 to 350 million years ago).
Carbon dating is perfectly fine for dinosaurs. I have some dinosaur in the fridge right now they could work on if they wanted. :p
There’s far worse* scientific crimes here than calling all radiometric dating ‘carbon dating’… Non-avian dinosaurs at 120 mya (45 million years after the last nads went extinct), any dinosaur with that posture aside from therizinosaurs (which those obviously ain’t) – and even they wouldn’t have bent their tails like that – actually, literally everything about the anatomy is so genericized as to be incomprehensible, and, honestly, points away from dinosauria, or any other sort of reptile.
* Well, worse to my mind…chronologists or chronology nerds will probably have different priorities.
… Shit, why do I keep doing that. 65 is not 165. Why brain, why? I know that’s wrong, and yet it always pops up! And why do you always do that when I’m being pompously nitpicky? >_<
Now I’m wondering if Kamino Neko is actually Abby Howard or Kory Bing.
On top of the dating problem, tar pits, at least in my mind, are associated with the late Pleistocene/early Holocene (i.e. mammals). Or do tar pits eventually turn into oil shales or something?
I thought it was cute. @Kilby (1) – I’m impressed that at the range of knowledge you had at hand that worked together to spoil the joke for you. Sometimes a fossil is just a fossil.
It is a fossil of a joke, of course. I was walking on the college campus and many beautiful coeds ran up to me and said they wanted to date me. Unfortunately, it was carbon date me.
Likewise, every night, a group of beautiful coeds spend all night at my front door, knocking and screaming. Unfortunately, the police keep coming and letting them out.
Just to add to some of the criticisms already made…
The whole “tar pits” thing is a reference to the the La Brea Tar Pits, which did not exist until about 40,000 years ago. It was an unusual thing: tar pits were not generally spread all over the Pleistocene. More generically, the term “predator trap” is sometimes used to describe similar phenomena whereby prey and predators are trapped and die. There are examples of this in the dinosaur record, but I don’t know of any that were tar pits (quick sand, perhaps).
While with special handling and processing, radiocarbon dating may be used for objects as old as 70,000 years, that still doesn’t get us anywhere near the Early Cretaceous. And while the early mammals that emerged in that period are inevitably referred to as “rodent-like” or “rat-like,” the first true rodents did not appear until after the mass extinction that marked the end of the (non-avian) dinosaurs some 65-million years ago.
So, in short, carbon dating is useless for 120-million-year-old fossils, and at the time these creatures supposedly lived, there would be no rodents for them to munch on, and the La Brea Tar Pits would still be about 120 million years in the future.
@ Catlover – I didn’t mean to imply that the cartoon had no value. I was smiling as I groaned. I actually had just one piece of information, and another piece of misinformation, which led me to look up the other one. Ja is correct that carbon dating can now go beyond 50,000 years, but besides requiring special techniques, it is also limited to certain types of samples. There was once a time when the effective upper limit was circa 30k.
The reason I ended up with the dates for “carboniferous” is that I was checking the name. In German, this period is actually called “Karbon“, and I was hoping that the English title would be a perfect cognate.
To jump on the bandwagon of scientific criticism: I doubt that dinosaurs even went on dates, and even if they did, they’d be unlikely to hold hands or go on long walks during them.
At least they weren’t Carnotaurus, who COULDN’T hold hands.