How do scientists know that an animal fossil or rock is thousands, millions, millions or billions of years old on this earth?
How do scientists know that an animal fossil or rock is thousands, millions, millions or billions of years old on this earth?
Once upon a time, #trilobites, #dinosaurs, #megalodon a huge shark and #woolly_mammoth lived on this earth. Now these creatures have disappeared from this world forever. How do we know about these animals that they existed on this earth and in what period they existed? When the scientists found the fossils of these creatures, then the next mission was to find out what era they lived on this earth.
Scientists use many methods to determine the age of rocks and fossils of different organisms. After 1945, scientists were able to date objects that were hundreds of millions or even billions of years old.
There are many ancient rocks on Earth that still contain lava or ash that contains radioactive material. This means they are still unstable today. Particles and energy are still being released from within these rocks. Due to this natural process, the radioactive material decays from within them and sometimes after a long period of time on these rocks, it completely disappears from within them.
Now different radioactive materials take different time to be released from them. What scientists do now is measure the element uranium in this radioactive material. Now if a rock is very old, to check its half-life one would first measure U_235, which has a half-life of about 700 million years, plus U_238, which has a half-life of about 5.4 billion years. There are other elements that have even longer half-lives.
In addition, scientists also use carbon-14 dating to check the ages of various objects. Its half-life would be about 5730 years.It is mostly found inside old bones or wood.Things that were once alive.Fossils less than 100 to 50,000 years old are checked by this method.
Now the fossils of these organisms which are millions of years old are checked by using the same different methods in which the probability of error is less than one percent.
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