Ancient shell shows days were half-hour shorter 70 million years ago

[Igel]

3. It confirms and fine tunes a lot of things.

Length of day. So how is the Earth slowing?

Distance of Moon from Earth. Connected with the previous issue, it's good for confirmation because it includes tidal information, which, together with the length of a solar day, tells you how long a synodic month was, and that gets you lunar distance and tangential velocity for a specific time. (The values are always there in the math, but the timestamp is important.)

Climatologists draw conclusions from laminae thickness to opine about the climate that the little critters lived in.

Biologists would like that it shows that this species wasn't subjected to seasonal stress. And just the methodology, something used on recently-dead critters that can be extended back 70 million years is a great thing. Some articles can have meh results but whoa! innovations in methodology. (Of course, both meh and whoa! depend on the perceiver's point of view.)