Research: Improving the dating of older mammalian fossils

Research summary

• August 2019 to July 2022

Working with leading international universities, we are aiming to improve techniques for dating fossils - allowing us to see further into the past and better understand how mammalian life evolved on Earth millions of years ago.

The limits of carbon dating make it difficult to assess fossils older than about 50,000 years. As a result, our understanding of the mammalian response to changing environments is skewed to focus on the most recent past.

This project will explore a new technique that enables dating of fossils from up to around four million years ago.

Known as intracrystalline protein degradation (IcPD), this amino acid racemisation method uses the breakdown of proteins trapped within fossils, in particular tooth enamel, to directly date a sample.

It will help date a wide range of mammalian species and geographical regions and improve our understanding of mammalian evolution, especially responses to environmental change.

At Manchester Met, we will lead on the use of microfluidic techniques for IcPD analysis.

We aim to significantly reduce the amount of enamel sample used, so that culturally important samples can be better preserved. And we are also trying to create a simpler and more portable testing system, so analysis can be undertaken outside specialist labs, for example at archaeological sites.