When there really were more days in a year

Nature 217 (March 9th, 1968) had a paper that said that back in the Cretaceous (final era of the dinosaur age) there were some 370 days in a year, derived from ridges on the surface of fossil corals and other sea shells (annual growth patterns). Even further back in time fossil corals indicate there were 400 days in a year, a fact now encompassed in consensus thinking as it is supportive of uniformitarianism and suggests the spin of the earth is actually slowing down – very slowly. In the same issue of Nature there is another paper describing work at CERN where scientists were already involved in trying to track down the elusive neutrino particles. An experiment had taken place that involved over a million photographic plates.