How do scientists tell a fossils age?
Step One Understand that you can’t tell the age of a fossil by simply looking at it, especially with an untrained eye. A bone fragment found in a farmer’s field, for instance, could have been left behind by a dinosaur, or it could be a chicken bone tossed aside at last summer’s family picnic. Step Two Know that there are two methods of dating fossils employed by the scientific community: absolute and relative. Step Three Follow the relative method, a dating technique that’s been in use for about 200 years, to tell a fossil’s age. By this method, the age of the sedimentary rock surrounding the fossil is estimated based on its correlation to the geologic column. This simply means that if a layer of rock that housed the fossil is known to belong to the Cambrian Period, then the fossil likely deposited around that time. Step Four Be aware that not all fossils can be dated using the relative method, nor is the method itself without flaw. For instance, environmental disturbances may not allo
