Re: [dinosaur] Most precise dating of dinosaur fossils

[Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com>]

Be careful not to confuse precision with accuracy. The example of Abydosaurus is instructive: the date you gave of 104.46 Mya is extremely precise; but it might not be very accurate. It could be 104.46 precisely, 104.46  1Ma, or 104.46  10Ma. I once read a paper (Graur and Martin 2002) that pointed out sloppy methods in other word had come up with a date for the arthropod-nematode divergence of 1167 Mya  14.2 billion years, i.e. some time within a period beginning before the origin of the physical universe, and 13 billion years in the future!

-- Mike.

REFERENCE

Graur, Dan and William Martin. 2002. Reading the entrails of chickens: molecular timescales of evolution and the illusion of precision. Trends in Genetics 20(2):80-86.

On Tue, 20 Apr 2021 at 11:56, 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