There is a better way, and Elizabeth Fournier, affectionately dubbed the"Green Reaper," walks you through it, step-by-step.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, Jo Wolfe, a postdoc in the Department of
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences(EAPS) at MIT, and Gregory Fournier, an assistant professor in EAPS,
report new work combining horizontal gene transfer data with the microbial fossil record that allowed them to estimate absolute ages for methane-producing microbes on the geological timeline.