Explore Fossils!
With 25 Great Projects
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Explore Fossils! With 25 Great Projects, readers can expand their dinosaur obsessions into learning opportunities that take them beyond Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and even Tyrannosaurus rex to other animals, plants, and microbes that lived long before humans.
Explore Fossils! introduces young readers to the history of life on Earth as revealed by fossils. Kids learn how fossils form and about the different types of fossils and the world of long ago—its landscape and the plants and animals that lived then. Scientists use radiometric dating to test fossils to discover when they were made, what organisms made them, what those organisms used for energy, what killed them, and a whole lot of other information. All from rocks! That's a lot of information stored under our feet.
Activities include creating plaster fossils, using popcorn to illustrate radiometric dating, and exploring what might have caused mass extinctions by making a lava flow and simulating an asteroid impact.
By studying the past, not only do students meet amazing plants and animals, they are also encouraged to consider their own role in geological time to make thoughtful hypotheses about the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Browns intersperse indoor and outdoor activities with information about fossils, dinosaur, and paleontology in this entry in the Explore Your World! series. One early experiment helps readers get a sense of geological time by taking a 10-minute walk: the first step correlates to the Earth's formation, four billion years ago; step 460 stands for the present day, and humans pop up at step 459 1/2. Relevant vocabulary terms (radioactive decay, chloroplasts, theropods) appear and are defined throughout, and Stone's cartoons feature a recurring pair of unnamed animal paleontologists (one is a pterosaur), as well as help illustrate the various experiments. Clear, straightforward writing helps introduce sometimes complex topics like radiometric dating, as well as how human understanding of dinosaurs has changed through research and discovery. Ages 7 10.
