What information can radiocarbon dating tell paleontologists

How Carbon Dating Works

Covering a story? Visit our page for journalists or call Learn more here. Radiocarbon dating, or carbon dating, is a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60, years. First developed in the late s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby, the technique is based on the decay of the carbon isotope. The invention of radiocarbon dating elegantly merged chemistry and physics to develop a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60, years.

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The age of fossils can be determined using stratigraphy, biostratigraphy, and radiocarbon dating. Paleontology seeks to map out how life evolved across geologic time. A substantial hurdle is the difficulty of working out fossil ages.

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This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Despite seeming like a relatively stable place, the Earth's surface has changed dramatically over the past 4.

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Radiocarbon dating only works half the time. We may have found the solution

So, how do we know how old a fossil is? There are two main methods determining a fossils age, relative dating and absolute dating. Relative dating is used to determine a fossils approximate age by comparing it to similar rocks and fossils of known ages. Absolute dating is used to determine a precise age of a fossil by using radiometric dating to measure the decay of isotopes, either within the fossil or more often the rocks associated with it. Relative Dating The majority of the time fossils are dated using relative dating techniques.

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