• Question: How can you decide when dinosaurs lived?

    Asked by duty49hut on 26 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Lara Codeca

      Lara Codeca answered on 26 Nov 2020:

      Hello, this is not my field, but I can tell you that the way it’s done is by radiocarbon dating.

      I’m not the best at explaining this but I can send you to a good Wikipedia page with a lot of good references and bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating

    • Photo: Danny Hnatyshin

      Danny Hnatyshin answered on 26 Nov 2020:

      It a bit of a process! So when a dinosaur dies it get buried in sediment which then turns to rock. So you assume that the rock is the same age as the bones.

      Often these rocks have special minerals inside them the record how old the rock is. These minerals record how old these rocks are because they are slightly radioactive which we can use to figure out how old they are because the older the rock is the less radioactive they are.

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