Precisely. The whole paper seems to be about the uncertainty of such estimates, i.e. the science. And the researchers have done a lot more work on this before; they aren't new to the field and wet around the ears.
2 points to be aware of:
1. The journal this is published in is not held in high esteem by most paleontologists. This may be telling; I imagine the paper was rejected by several other journals before ending up here. Peer review seems a little light at PE. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but calls for caution.
2. Everything hangs on the authors' interpretation of the age of the sediments; the bones don't seem reworked (i.e. moved around from older sediments), which is one source of error, but he could be wrong with the radiometric age estimation, which even in the best cases has a moderate margin of error.
BUT it remains an interesting question of any dinosaurs survived long past the extinction; most of our picture of the K-T event comes from central/western North America, so who knows what happened elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
And the paper is about those kinds of errors; i.e. read the science to critique it, not the press release/Reuters story.
Precisely. The whole paper seems to be about the uncertainty of such estimates, i.e. the science. And the researchers have done a lot more work on this before; they aren't new to the field and wet around the ears.
What? Read the paper. They used the real skeletons (5 of them), not birds or crocodiles, as models.
The researchers' website:
http://bit.ly/qlfC2i
And the paper: (free to all! open access yay!)
http://bit.ly/ruvel3
The Space Jockeys, yesss! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Jockey_(Alien)
2 points to be aware of: 1. The journal this is published in is not held in high esteem by most paleontologists. This may be telling; I imagine the paper was rejected by several other journals before ending up here. Peer review seems a little light at PE. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but calls for caution. 2. Everything hangs on the authors' interpretation of the age of the sediments; the bones don't seem reworked (i.e. moved around from older sediments), which is one source of error, but he could be wrong with the radiometric age estimation, which even in the best cases has a moderate margin of error. BUT it remains an interesting question of any dinosaurs survived long past the extinction; most of our picture of the K-T event comes from central/western North America, so who knows what happened elsewhere.