""We always thought that those rings were formed annually," says Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, a paleobiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In other words, much like tree rings, the idea was that roughly one ring was laid down each year. "And then you can plot that and you can work out the growth rate of the dinosaur," explains Chinsamy-Turan. "And that's what all of us were doing me included.""
"In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, Chinsamy-Turan and her colleague, biologist Maria Eugenia Pereyra, looked at the growth rings in several young Nile crocodiles a modern relative of dinosaurs. In some of the bones, the two researchers found more growth rings than they were expecting. If the same was true in dinosaurs, some of these specimens were likely younger than scientists once thought."
"An ideal way to confirm the one-ring-per-year aging approach would be to study live dinosaurs. That's an unlikely proposition, given that dinosaurs have been extinct for more than 65 million years. Instead, researchers often turn to their living relatives like birds and crocodiles. Just outside of Cape Town, a flotilla of Nile crocs lurks in the pools beneath a network of pedestrian bridges at Le Bonheur Reptiles & Adventures."
Estimating dinosaur age traditionally relied on counting growth rings in fossil bones, with one ring assumed to equal one year. That method produced age and growth-rate estimates, such as T. rex taking about twenty years to reach full adult size. Researchers examined growth rings in several young Nile crocodiles, a living relative of dinosaurs, and observed more rings than expected in some bones. The detection of extra rings suggests rings may not be strictly annual. If dinosaurs deposited rings similarly, many dinosaur specimens could have been younger than previously estimated. The crocodile observations came from a captive population near Cape Town.
Read at www.npr.org
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