Paleobotanists estimate the moment in the remote past when a given species became extinct by taking cylindrical, vertical core samples well below the earth's sur- face and looking for the last occurrence of the species in the fossil record, measured in meters above the point p at which the species was known to have first emerged. letting [v, i- ,n} denote a sample of such distances above pat a random set of locations, the model uniform(0, 8) ) emerges from simple and plausible assumptions. in this model the unknown θ > 0 can be used through carbon dating, to estimate the species extinction time. the marginal distribution of a single observation y, in this model may be written 0 otherwise where 1 (a) = 1 if a is true and 0 otherwise.