Re: [dinosaur] Most precise dating of dinosaur fossils

[Thomas Richard Holtz <tholtz@umd.edu>]

Ditto what Mike Taylor said.

But it is true: with increased precision of instrumentation, we can more precisely measure the amounts of materials in a sample, and this increase the precision of the estimated time.

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 6:56 AM Poekilopleuron <dinosaurtom2015@seznam.cz> wrote:

Good day!

I apologise for my annoying curiosity, but I cannot resist to ask the honoured list members another question. What is the most precise dating of non-avian dinosaur fossil? I know there are dates going to just tenths of thousands of years, given for various formations and of course there is a dating of K-Pg event (about 66.04 mya). But would you really accept as a strong fact that say sauropod _Abydosaurus mcintoshi_ was 104.46 million years old (plus minus one million years)?

I've noticed there was a radiometric dating result going to even higher precision of just thousands of years, but I guess this was not something you could rely on simply because of the unavoidable error of radiometric time measumerents. Any thoughts on this? Thank you in advance! Tom

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Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
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