How Old Are Fossils?

This 1927 leaflet, written for museum visitors and curious general readers, takes us back to a pivotal moment in our understanding of deep time. Before radiocarbon dating and modern geochronology, scientists were just beginning to harness radioactivity to unlock Earth's ancient secrets. Sharat Kumar Roy guides readers through the methods used to estimate fossil ages: the slow accumulation of salts in oceans, the patient deposition of sediments, and the revolutionary insights that radioactivity brought to geological timekeeping. Roy contrasts historical beliefs about Earth's age with the emerging scientific consensus, showing how each new method sharpened our picture of deep time. The book captures an era when old techniques like studying sedimentation rates were giving way to something far more precise, ultimately revealing that life on Earth is far older than common belief once allowed. For anyone curious about how we learned to read the石头 pages of geological time, this brief work offers a window into early twentieth-century science in action.