Investigating Fossils

Jack is on a roll with paleontology and zoology at the moment.

He's not distinguishing much, at the moment, between the two.

The leopard tortoise and the apatosaurus are equally interesting to him. But fossils hold still better than living moles and chipmunks, so they have an edge in holding a boy's attention.

Last night after dinner, he and Rod went through the bucket of fossils we dug up at fossil park last October to see if they could identify what we found.

There were quite a few pieces of Brachiopods, the occasional piece of horned coral, and one almost complete Trilobite.

Convincing Jack that these were neither rocks (exactly) nor living animals was a bit of a challenge, but he seems to be hard at work on classification, even though the concept of fossils and extinction are still very confusing to him. (This is tying it together for him that when we die, our bodies turn back to dirt, though. He speculated that Grandpa and Popjack must be rocks by now, bcause they have been gone so long.)

Jack has now moved some of the smaller, clearer fossils into a small box and has requested that we work on digging some of the others out of their bigger peices of rock, so I'm pretty sure we're not done with these fossils yet.

We want to stop in at Fossil Park again next June, just after they pour in the new rocks from the quarry. We hope to get some better (easier to recover) specimens. The the ones we got were from well-picked over rock and while they weren't bad, we're told the fresh rock results in some amazing specimens.

(Connor's Dad managed to find some of those -- but he is both more agile and more persistent than we are. )

Jack will probably have more fun with the actual excavation as he gets older -- especially if the fossils he finds are plentiful and more intact and thus more recognizable.

This homeschooling thing, even though at four, it mostly means following your child's whimseys,. is a LOT of fun. No reason this part couldn't be done with a schooled child...except that it never seemed to happen.