Materials
Modeling clay, air-dry clay, store-bought or homemade dough (non-edible kind)
Several hard, patterned items that will make good impressions in the clay/dough (shell, leaf, your hand, or a toy, for example)
Instructions
- Take a chunk of your clay or dough and roll it into a ball. Then flatten it into a circle at least ½ inch think.
- Press a shell, leaf or another item with a bumpy surface into your clay. Press it firmly so that it leaves a good print in the clay. Then carefully pull your item out of the clay.
- Next, examine your impression. Pretend like you don’t know what made the print and list things that you can learn by looking at the print. Is it round? Square? Is it from an animal or a plant?
- Ask a family member to guess what the item was that you used to make the impression. Give them a hint if they get stumped!
- Now, let’s pretend your impression has turned into a fossil over the course of a million of years. You can hide your fossil in a sandbox or under a pile of leaves. Ask a friend or family member to help you find your fossil by carefully brushing away the sand or leaves.
Why It’s So
Dinosaur bones that people find today are bones that turned into rocks or fossils. Sometimes, after a dinosaur died, its bones remained on top of the ground. Over many, many, many years (millions, in fact) those bones were covered with layers of sand and mud. All of the layers of sand and mud pushed and pushed on the bones. Water and tiny minerals ran through the inside of the bones, too. The pushing on the bones and minerals turned the bones into fossils. Over time, the layers of sand and mud wore away (or eroded) and parts of the fossils were found. Dinosaur fossils you see in museums have been very carefully removed from the ground.