Editing Fossil (section)

=== After Darwin ===
Since Darwin's time, the fossil record has been extended to between 2.3 and 3.5&nbsp;billion years.<ref>Schopf JW (1999) Cradle of Life: The Discovery of the Earth's Earliest Fossils, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.</ref> Most of these Precambrian fossils are microscopic bacteria or [[micropaleontology|microfossils]]. However, macroscopic fossils are now known from the late Proterozoic. The [[Ediacara biota]] (also called Vendian biota) dating from 575&nbsp;million years ago collectively constitutes a richly diverse assembly of early multicellular [[eukaryote]]s.

The fossil record and faunal succession form the basis of the science of [[biostratigraphy]] or determining the age of rocks based on embedded fossils. For the first 150 years of [[geology]], biostratigraphy and superposition were the only means for determining the [[relative dating|relative age]] of rocks. The [[geologic time scale]] was developed based on the relative ages of rock strata as determined by the early paleontologists and [[stratigraphy|stratigraphers]].

Since the early years of the twentieth century, [[absolute dating]] methods, such as [[radiometric dating]] (including [[K–Ar dating|potassium/argon]], [[Argon–argon dating|argon/argon]], [[uranium–lead dating|uranium series]], and, for very recent fossils, [[radiocarbon dating]]) have been used to verify the relative ages obtained by fossils and to provide absolute ages for many fossils. Radiometric dating has shown that the earliest known stromatolites are over 3.4&nbsp;billion years old.