• I have what I think is a dinosaur bone. Can you radiocarbon date it and tell me if it's 65 million years old?

No, we can't radiocarbon date dinosaurs. The half-life of the carbon-14 isotope is 5730 years; after about 10 half-lives, there is no detectable amount of carbon-14 present. Anything that is older than about 60,000 years cannot be dated with carbon-14, though there are other dating methods (like electron spin resonance, thermoluminescence, and optically-stimulated luminescence) or other isotopes with longer half-lives (like potassium-40 or uranium-235) that may be useful for older materials like dinosaur bones and minerals. Our group only works with carbon-14 dating as it relates to archaeology, the study of the human past.

• Can you radiocarbon date this [painting, sculpture, art object] and tell me if it's really a [Rembrandt, Moore, etc.]?

No, because even though the materials like the paint, canvas, or wood may be of the right age to be attributable to a certain artist, that does not authenticate the painting as by any particular artist. Read more about how radiocarbon dating was recently used to expose a forged painting here. This work demonstrates how different materials can yield different ages. We do not radiocarbon date for authentication purposes any objects belonging to individuals. We only undertake scholarly projects brought to us from museums or other institutions.

• Can you radiocarbon date this sample for me?

Maybe, but it depends on what you want to know if it's going to be useful. A radiocarbon date, like any other piece of data, is only as good as the sample. The sample has to be connected to what you actually want to know. If you have a beam in a house and you want to radiocarbon date a sample of that beam to determine how old the house is, those are really two different questions. All the radiocarbon date on the wood from the beam will tell you is when the tree was cut down, not when it was made into a beam or when it was used to build the house. The beam might not be original to the house; it could have been recycled from another building (a common practice in the past). A single radiocarbon date is not usually very helpful, either. If you got radiocarbon dates (or even better, dendrochronological dates, based on multiple tree rings) from many beams in an old house, that will give you a better indication of when the house was constructed. Dendrochronology was successfully used recently at the Warner Homestead site in Brighton, Michigan to determine when the house there was first built.

• How much does radiocarbon dating cost?

Anywhere from a lot to too much. We do not run routine radiocarbon samples unless they are part of a larger project on other samples (like rock paintings) that require special processing. If you have a routine sample for dating, contact a contract lab like Beta Analytic. Costs generally start around $1,000 per sample at such labs, but vary based on size and how much preparation is needed. Researchers with scholarly questions should contact Dr. Armitage to inquire about possible future projects.

• Can you tell me about the accuracy/precision/etc. of radiocarbon dating?

There is lots of reliable information on this elsewhere.