Carbon-14 dating only works back to about 50,000 years, most fossils are older than that and they use radiometric dating.
(Not a scientist, I’m sure my wording will make experts cringe, but I think my gist is good)
Fossils are basically rocks that form around hard things like bones. They look at radioactive elements in the rock and figure out how much has decayed and they know when the rock was formed.
Uranium lead dating is one of the most used methods. In it, they look at zircon crystals and measure the amount of uranium and lead. Uranium decays into lead, so that tells them how long the decay has been happening.
That always seemed sketchy to me, how do they know it didn’t just have a bunch of lead in it to start with? Then I learned something…
When zircon forms, lead can’t bind with it and it gets pushed out of the zircon. Uranium doesn’t get pushed out, so there are small pockets of uranium in fresh zircon and no lead. A million years later, we just look at how much lead and uranium there is and get a very good idea at when it was formed.
Carbon-14 dating only works back to about 50,000 years, most fossils are older than that and they use radiometric dating.
(Not a scientist, I’m sure my wording will make experts cringe, but I think my gist is good)
Fossils are basically rocks that form around hard things like bones. They look at radioactive elements in the rock and figure out how much has decayed and they know when the rock was formed.
Uranium lead dating is one of the most used methods. In it, they look at zircon crystals and measure the amount of uranium and lead. Uranium decays into lead, so that tells them how long the decay has been happening.
That always seemed sketchy to me, how do they know it didn’t just have a bunch of lead in it to start with? Then I learned something…
When zircon forms, lead can’t bind with it and it gets pushed out of the zircon. Uranium doesn’t get pushed out, so there are small pockets of uranium in fresh zircon and no lead. A million years later, we just look at how much lead and uranium there is and get a very good idea at when it was formed.