What process would a scientist use to calculate the exact age of fossils?
1 Answer
Radio-carbon dating.
Explanation:
Ages of very old samples need a reference that has a similar timescale. Different references may be needed for different ranges of ages, from hundreds of years to millions of years. Chemistry provides one solution in the form of the ratios of radioactive materials because the rate of decomposition or change to another form is known and constant over time.
In all measurements we must be very careful to include the error of the measurement. When we say “exact” age we cannot mean a specific date, or even a year, because the error built-in to the method may only give us a range of even several hundreds of years. That is why fossil dating can be done with radio-carbon dating (the ratio of Carbon isotopes 14 and 12) but you couldn't determine the age of a recent building in that way.
