Search the Community

Hi. This fall I will be teaching a paleontology class for 5th and 6th graders. We will meet once a week for 55 minutes. My plan is to teach up front for about ten minutes and then for the remainder of the class to be hands on activities. I have come up with some ideas, but would love some feedback on them and any other ideas that you all might have. The first session will be an introduction to paleontology, possibly including fieldwork methods, fossil prep, ichnology and trace fossils, adaptations, cladistics, plate tectonics, etc, while the second session will be more focused on the actual organisms that we find in the fossil record and how they changed through time. The second session will build a fossil kit as the session progresses to take home at the end. Here are the topics I have come up with so far: 1. What makes a dinosaur a dinosaur, addressing the dinosaur-bird connection 2. Cladistics- using either coins or candy or both 3. Fossils and sedimentary layers, layer cake stratigraphy (not sure about using food, depends on allergies) or could use colored sand and plastic cups with animal shaped beads to be the fossils 4. Dinosaurs and speed activity, have students learn to calculate their own speed over a given distance and apply that to dinosaur foot impressions 5. Plate tectonics and fossils, have the kids reconstruct the earth 220 million years ago based on fossils found on the different puzzle pieces that the land masses have been broken up into 6. Dinosaur teeth, learning the difference between meat-eaters and plant-eaters and discuss the size of dino teeth 7. Chocolate chip cookie excavation exercise, to teach how difficult fossils can be to extract from matrix and to prepare for study 8. Activity using a pant tray covered in dirt, rocks, and some sand. Sprinkle glitter (glitter= dead animal bones) over the dirt. Then gentle rain water out of a paper cup over your pretend hillside and watch the dirt absorb the water. There is a greater chance the glitter bones will be make it into the fossil record vs. the desert. Put plastic wrap over your hillside to simulate the desert. Sprinkle on your glitter and rain over it...glitter washes away into the arroyo, bones are separated, lost, broken, etc.... --> trying to develop into a way of showing how fossils end up getting in to the fossil record more easily in a forest environment vs. a desert environment. Still only just the beginning of an idea.

Currently the company that I work for has temporarily layed us off while we move into a brand new building. Unfortunately we are not getting payed during this time by them. We had a choice of going on unemployment or using some of our vacation time. I opted for using vacation. December 14 was our last day until everything is up and running. We are hoping to be back to work by January 14 but may not be back till later if problems arise. Anyways, I have been trying to keep busy while I have been off. Christmas and New years was nice time with family. I also enjoyed my trip to New Jersey last week. A couple days this past week I was helping a friend off mine who has purchased a house to fix up and flip. Thursday I went with a friend to look for arrowheads. Though we didn't find any, we found some stream worn horn corals. Yesterday I went with my wife to the Salmon River to hike and enjoy nature. Later on last night we celebrated my oldest son David's 19th Birthday. Today we took our youngest two boys skiing. Dylan has been going through school for about 4yrs. This was Devins first time and he had a blast. I am not sure what the rest of my time away from work will bring but I am trying to fill it with as much as I can.

Hello All! I need your help, but first I'd best introduce myself. I'm the new Program Coordinator -- and on-site paleontologist -- for the Waco Mammoth Site. For those of unfamiliar with the site, it's a late-Pleistocene recurrent mass-mortality site for Columbian mammoths and a scattering of other Rancholabrean megafauna. From 68 KA onwards at least two groups of mammoths and their camp-followers got caught in flash floods along a tributary of the Bosque River in what would become the western outskirts of Waco, TX. The site is currently a city-run in-situ display of six of those mammoths, in an enclosed climate-controlled shelter. The facility is loaded with educational potential, but at the moment all we've got is a (very nice) guided tour. I want to do better. One of the educational activities I'm looking to add in the near future is a screen-washing. I'll have the students screen and pick fossiliferous sediment and ID what they've found. They'll be able to keep most of what they find (with exceptions for scientifically important specimens) and all of their findings will get entered into a database that will be run through the PAST statistical package. I'll write up the results and try to get them published -- with the kids listed individually in the acknowledgements. The kids get real fossils, they get to participate in a real scientific study, and I get to do some research. I think it's an idea with potential, with one wrinkle; I'm having a hard time getting the sediment! I've tried buying phosphate gravel from the mines in Florida and North Carolina, but my efforts seem to be stalling. I know that some such gravel is available for resale, but it's a tad pricey. There's no way I could afford to buy the 100 or so kilos I want on the shoe-string budget I've got for the time being. If anyone has a line on a better source of bulk sediment, I'd love to hear from you! In fact, if you've got any ideas for spreading interest in paleontology, we need to talk. Paleontology is the gateway drug of science -- if we want to teach critical thinking in this country, fossils are the best place to start. Please help me work to make that happen. Regards, Don Esker