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can carbon 14 dating be used to detect the age of a live animal
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The method was developed in the late 1940s by Willard Libby, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 1960. It is based on the fact that radiocarbon ( C) is constantly being created in the atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting C combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire C by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and from that point onwards the amount of C it contains begins to decrease as the C undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of C in a sample from a dead plant or animal such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. The older a sample is, the less C there is to be detected, and because the half-life of C (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to around 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally permit accurate analysis of older samples.

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