Letters: Millions, not thousands

April 14, 2010 9:39:00 AM



It was encouraging to learn that the Tupelo Middle School has an active science club (April 12) and that they had a good field trip to a fossil bed. The article, written by a reporter from the NE Miss. Daily Journal, noted that the fossils, shark teeth and oyster shells, were from a deposit "dated to the Cretaceous Period" and that they were "thousands of years old." 


To say that those fossils are thousands of years old is like saying your house note costs only pennies a day . . true, but misleading. Inasmuch as the Cretaceous closed out 65 million years ago, those fossils must be at least 65,000 thousand years old. 


For that matter, the earth is also just thousands of years old . . 4,600,000 thousand years. 


William Hairston