US EditionDinosaur Eggs From China Found to Be Around 86 Million Years Old, According to ‘Atomic Clock’ Dating | News Channel 3-12
- Researchers in China dated fossilized dinosaur eggs found at Qinglongshan in the Yunyang Basin to roughly 85 million years ago using carbonate uranium-lead dating.
- The team applied this new direct dating method to resolve long-standing uncertainties about egg ages, as traditional dating used indirect methods relying on surrounding materials.
- Their analysis focused on two eggshell fragments from one egg in a cluster of 28, with results consistent with the geological age of surrounding Late Cretaceous rocks amid global cooling.
- Dr. Bi Zhao suggested that P. tumiaolingensis could indicate a lineage of egg-laying dinosaurs that did not survive environmental cooling, reflecting significant consequences for understanding dinosaur adaptation and extinction during the Late Cretaceous.
- Published in 2025 in Frontiers in Earth Science, this study establishes precise dating for Qinglongshan fossils for the first time, offering new insights that could transform current perspectives on dinosaur evolution and past climate dynamics.
26 Articles
26 Articles
Global volcanic activity, events of ocean oxygen depletion, massive extinctions... Those are some of the most prominent features of the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago and ended abruptly 66 years ago, when a huge meteorite ended up with more than 70% of the living species of the Earth. But there is much more. We know that at that time the climate was warm and humid, with average temperatures about 5 degrees above the current…
These dinosaur eggs survived 85 million years. What they reveal is wild
Dating dinosaur eggs has always been tricky because traditional methods rely on surrounding rocks or minerals that may have shifted over time. Now, for the first time, scientists have directly dated dinosaur eggs by firing lasers at tiny eggshell fragments. The technique revealed that fossils in central China are about 85 million years old, placing them in the late Cretaceous period. This breakthrough not only sharpens our timeline of dinosaur h…
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