Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Regardless of whether you’re a firm believer in the Alvarez hypothesis or prefer theories about increased volcanism leading to the death of tons of prehistoric lizards, one certainty might now be in question: that dinosaurs didn’t live more than a few generations past these events. In fact, it’s possible that some of the dinosaurs may have survived as long as 700,000 years past the date of their previously established mass extinction. (To put that in perspective, we only just emerged from the Stone Age a few thousand years ago.)

The new theory revolves around a relatively unorthodox system for dating fossils being employed by researchers at the University of Alberta in New Mexico. The team, lead by Larry Heaman, uses a direct-dating method called U-pb (uranium-lead) dating to determine the age of the fossils they unearth. Basically, they shoot a laser beam into the fossil to unseat tiny particles, which they then in turn subject to isotopic analysis.

This dating method is in stark contrast to chronology (or relative) dating, the more traditional method used by most paleontologists.  This system relies upon determining a fossil’s age by examining the layer of sediment in which it was found. The team of researchers at U of A believes their method is more accurate because fossils may drift from their original placement in the strata, thus causing surrounding sediment to be misleading.

The fossil in question is from a hadrosaur’s femur bone, meaning that if this team is correct, a duck-billed dinosaur was roaming around 700 millennia after most other dinosaurs were dead!

What’s it all mean? We’ll have to wait and see.

[via Science Daily]


Stubby the Rocket is the mascot of Tor.com and tends to be the handle for many of the staff. Stubby was not responsible for the death of the dinosaurs despite being in the solar system around that same time.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Stubby the Rocket

Author

Learn More About Stubby
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
21 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments