Kids' Paleontology: Dinosaurs, Round 2

Last class we did the bird hipped dinosaurs (tanks and beaks), this time we went for the lizard hips.

There are two basic kinds here also: long neck dinosaurs (sauropods) and two foot carnivore dinosaurs (theropods).

The sauropods are the largest. Except for some weird island dwarfs, the smallest of these was larger than an elephant.

 They were all plant eaters with air sacs in their bones that helped support those massive bodies as well as helping them manage their body temperature.

One thing I always thought interesting is that these enormous plant eaters couldn't chew.  That's a lot of energy to get from leaves when you can't chew!

We used a sandwich bag and a spinach leaf to illustrate the problem.  The bag is like the stomach: when the kids mushed the leaf inside the bag, it hardly broke down at all.

But these dinosaurs, like some birds today, swallowed rocks (gastroliths: stomach stones) to grind the food in their stomachs.  We added a bit of bird grit (like coarse sand) and the leaves were quickly pulverized.

The fossil gift of the week was dinosaur eggshells, almost definitely from sauropods, probably from saltosaurus.

 We saved the favorites for last: theropods! T Rex, Velociraptors, Deinonychus, Spinosaurus, Allosaurus, and Archeopteryx are all in this category.

These start out as all two legged carnivores, although a few late cretaceous ones become herbivores.

Here we get the birds: all theropods have wishbones, and most of them seem to have had feathers.

Then it was time to look a bit more at how we know what we know about these animals.

We put paint on kids' feet and had them walk, run and hop, to look at how we can tell so much about dinosaur bodies and movement from trackways and prints.

Only a few kids were actually up for getting paint on their feet, but they were all interested in the tracks!

Then it was time for my all time favorite dinosaur activity: chipping bones out of plaster.

They loved this!   I'm always amazed at how long they want to do it.

 And then the T Rexs showed up...

This may be my new favorite dinosaur activity!

I was concerned that some of the younger kids might be freaked, but they all LOVED the dino visit!

And many thanks to Zorg and friend for suiting up for science!