We have watched a Mary Anning programme. We're going to tell you all about it. It was a programme about lots of famous people who lived a long, long time ago. In this programme, there were five people: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he was an engineer; Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone; Florence Nightingale, she was a nurse; Harriet Tubman, she was a slave, but she escaped and helped other slaves escape, and Mary Anning.

The programme got a few things wrong, though. It did say that Mary Anning was struck by lightning when she was 15 months old, but the baby in the programme was only a few months old. And in the programme, she was a grown-up when she found the ichthyosaur, but she was really only twelve years old, and she found it with her brother Joseph. AND it was a whole one, and not just a head. The programme was really good, but I'm sad that they got some things wrong.  When they do stories about real people, then they should get it right!

(Image taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01d8rlf)

Today, we made fossil chocolates. We made a mould out of putty. It was in two parts, and we had to roll it to mix it together. (Edit from Mummy: food-grade silicon)

Then we pushed fossils in the mould - we cleaned them first.

When the moulds got hard, we pulled the fossils out. We made a few moulds from each fossil. We left the moulds over night, and then we washed them to get them nice and clean.

Then we needed to get the chocolate into the moulds - but they didn't fit like this!

So, we had to melt it. We had a pot of boiling water, with a pan in it. And that pan - can you see in this picture? - had the chocolate in.

The chocolate started to melt.

We put the chocolate into the moulds, then we put the moulds in the fridge.

And this is what they looked like!


...and that's our whole story. Why don't you make some chocolate fossils?

Here are some more fossils we found. I found the most, because there are lots in this one! It was really big and heavy, but we carried it all the way back up to the car.

There are nearly no rocks on these ammonites, so they are our bestest. There are two positives and two negatives, that means, two are ammonites and two are the patterns made by ammonites, can you tell which is which (they don't belong together)? Mummy found the ammonite in the picture below - it was just lying on the beach.

Last week-end, we went to Staithes and Port Mulgrave to go fossil hunting. It was Mummy's birthday. At Port Mulgrave, there was a path down to the beach - it was a loooong way down!

We found lots of ammonites, and some other fossils, but we'll tell you about the ammonites first. All the surprise fossils, they were all just ammonite surprise bits. A surprise fossil is when you don't know if it has got a fossil on the inside, then you crack it open. Sometimes, you can see a tiny bit of fossil on the outside, and that gives you a hint. We'll show you the other fossils another day, but here are the surprise fossils!

Today, we sorted out all my fossils, and put the bestest ones on a shelf. We had one that we'd found in Whitby, and it wasn't very pretty, so Mummy decided to bash it with a hammer and see if she could make the ammonite come out. And look what's inside. The ammonite is made out of pyrite, and there are crystals, too. Now it is on my bestest shelf! (Edit from Mummy: We need to learn how to prep fossils!)