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110 million years old feels like a shoot from the hip. How do they estimate the age of something like this?
by octocop 6y ago
110 million years old feels like a shoot from the hip. How do they estimate the age of something like this?
- osamagirl69 6y agoUsually using radiometric dating. Carbon-14 has too short of a halflife (~5000 years) to be useful for fossils, but potassium-40 has a long enough halflife (~1.2 billion years) that it can be used to date minerals going back to the formation of the earths crust--it has even been used to estimate when the moon was formed (4-5 billion years ago)!
- close04 6y agoRadiometric dating is also used on the layers around the fossil. In this case of the hydrocarbon deposit [0]. [0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293
- mattkrause 6y agoThere's a comment from the article's author here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14327802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14327802 The data is thought to be pretty accurate (±5M years) and it's from radiometric dating of the oil sands.