HOW old is everything? That's the question being posed by a new exhibition in York.

From a 4.5 billion-year-old Middlesbrough meteorite to the swords of rampaging Vikings, the display will give visitors the chance to "crack the time code" by experimenting with scientific dating techniques.

The exhibition, Fingerprints Of Time, opens at the Yorkshire Museum in February, and will run throughout the year.

Andrew Morrison, the museum's curator of archaeology, said: "How do we know a crocodile is 165 million years old? What is the one man-made object that we use today that has been in use for 500,000 years?

"These are the types of questions we will be answering in the exhibition. We have included some very interesting and rare items from our collection. These will range from prehistoric dinosaur bones, medieval jewellery, and Victorian costume right up to modern sweet wrappers."

Magnetism, light, heat and even radioactive atoms are all used to discover the age of things. Trees, rocks and fossils all lay down layers as time progresses - crucial to finding the date something died.

Andrew added: "It is amazing how much we can find out through applying the right techniques.

These methods can help us date how long we have lived on the earth for, when we first invented pottery, what were the first metals we used and even when we first started eating bread."

The Yorkshire Museum opens daily from 10am to 5pm. Fingerprints Of Time opens on February 10. For visitor information, phone 01904 687687.