Kids' Paleontology: Not Dinosaurs

This final class was all about animals that were there at the same time as the dinosaurs.

I was here before ducks. They are platypus billed birds.

We started with animals that are still around: crocodiles, horseshoe crabs, jellyfish, turtles, clams, snakes, lizards, bees, sea stars, duck billed platypuses...

Seriously, I did not know that about platypuses, that's part of the fun of doing these classes!

 Then we moved on to the pterosurs!

The smallest were sparrow sized, the largest were giraffe sized.  Most of them ate fish, but those giants ate the dwarf sauropods, and that just seems wrong!

It was really interesting to see how pterosaurs  were like and unlike birds.


 
They had hollow bones, beaks, and flying wings, but they also had fur, soft shelled eggs, teeth, and weird hands that they used for walking and climbing.

Most fascinating to me was how the birds have filled all the niches the pterosaurs did, and how their crests and beaks diversified in similar ways and for similar reasons to what we see now with birds.

If anything, this ecological overlap is even more pronounced with the marine reptiles!  Just like our marine mammals, the reptiles developed on land, then returned to the sea, while retaining the need to breathe air.

It's a bit eerie to think of the icthyosaurs as similar to dolphins, but their diet and shape are very similar.  Then it gets uncanny: they apparently gave birth to live young, tail first, exactly as dolphins are born today!

It makes sense because their body shapes don't allow them to return to land.

The plesiosaurs are the long necked ones that make you think of Nessie.  They were like seals in that they returned (awkwardly) to land to give birth.

Unlike most seals, they dragged their heads in the mud to scare up fish and other creatures..

Then there are the 60 foot mosasaurs.  Think whales.  Really scary carnivorous whales.

Our fossil this week was mosasaur teeth!

To finish up, we talked about the volcanoes and meteor strike that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs.

I had set up a large pan full of flour, and the kids enjoyed spiking a volleyball in it to see the ejected dust.

I also had set up (indoors) a lamp with an incandescent bulb shining on a glass pie plate perched on a can.  Half the plate was dusted with flour, and they could see and feel beneath the pie plate how less light meant less heat.

We talked quite a bit about the Deccan Traps, the site of those enormous eruptions which started before the meteor hit, but intensified after.  After 65 million years of weathering, there are still some 200 million cubic miles of basalt left over from those eruptions!  Geologists think that may be half or less of what was there when the eruption finally stopped.


So we ended the class with a bang!

Then we had one last hurrah, down by the Bay to collect their own fossils.











Also, I have to add that one of my 7 year old students made me this for my birthday.

And I don't think a class gets more successful than that!

Although the Emperor also gave me this beautiful ammonite.