This is stunning news, if true. Using a new uranium-lead dating method, researchers have determined the age of a fossil dinosaur bone from New Mexico with far greater accuracy than could be done before. Here’s the twist: the fossil bone dates from 64.8 million years ago — 700,000 years after the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous Period that supposedly wiped out all the dinosaurs. Abstract, news coverage, press release.

The idea that some dinosaurs survived at least part of the way into the Paleocene is something that one of the paper’s co-authors, James Fassett, has been promoting for some time, generating all kinds of controversy. This is not, in other words, the first or last word on the subject. Take this news in that context.

Now if you wanted to be excessively clever, you could argue that of course dinosaurs survived into the Paleocene, because birds are a clade of dinosaurs, and birds survive today. But you know what is meant here: non-avian dinosaurs.