It was my birthday, and I got lots of lovely fossil presents, but I'll tell you about them another time. Today, I want to tell you about my mammoth what I'm making. It is a model, because we want to make a bigger one, and this is a test to see if it'll work. We first made the body - we crunched some newspaper into a ball, and then we wrapped it in wire mesh, then we did papier mache all around it and left it to dry. Today, we made the head and the legs. The legs are made of toilet rolls, and the head it more scrunched up paper. First we used sellotape to fix it, and then we covered everything in more papier mache. And now it is drying. Next, we're going to do the ears and the trunk, and we'll show you when it's finished. And if it works, we'll make a big, big, big one.
1 Comment
One day, we went to a fossil fair, and there were lots of fossils. There were also people who told us of a special club. We already heard about it, because Joe told us. Joe found our website and he sent us an email. The club is called "Rockwatch", and today, we sent off a letter to say that I want to become a member. They have a special magazine, and they do fossil hunts and visits to museums. Would you like to be a member? You can read all about it here: http://www.rockwatch.org.uk/ We went to a dinosaur park in Germany. Auntie Katrin found it for us. There was lots to do, and lots to see. We saw lots and lots of dinosaurs, and real dinosaur tracks, because the park is where they found real dinosaur tracks. This is a track of footprints. This is exactly where it was found, and real experts are still looking all the time to find new things. They are working in the park. I've got my foot on a dinosaur footprint in the picture below - can you see? These are giant squids, but they walk on land, they are a bit like an elephant. But they're not real. In the park, there is a hall where they show creatures what they might look like in millions of years, like in five million years. This is me excavating a dinosaur head. It's a copy of a real head. The dinosaur was an eoraptor. It grew about as tall as Mummy's knee, so it was a small kind. It was in a block of plaster, and I had to be super careful so it doesn't break. There wasn't an eoraptor in the park, but we found a picture of one (taken from http://www.dinosauriens.info/dinosaures/dinosaure_eoraptor.php) I found a fish head in this rock. They were real fossils, but it was like a surprise, like our surprise fossils. You had to split and split the stone to see what you could find - and we all found something. Auntie Katrin found a fish scale, and Mummy found coprolite, and I found a fish head. We'll take some pictures and show you. This is me painting a dinosaur skull. It was like a 3d picture, and it was made of plaster. I had a really, really good time, and I want to go again! 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!) Today I was helping Mummy with a job. We went to Shugborough and visited Dinah, who works there. She helped us take pictures of our pigeons. On the way back, we went to a fossil place. It was a quarry (edit by Mum: West Quarry), and we've been there before. When we got there, we had a snack, and then we walked down. We found two types of fossils, and lots of each. One were brachiopods, they are in this picture. We also found lots of crinoid stems. We found these snail shells at the quarry. One of them is really pink - can you see? |
AuthorHello, my name is Toby. I am five years old, and I want to be a palaeontologist. I really like fossils, so I'm writing down everything I do with fossils! My Mummy is doing the typing until I'm a bit older, but she writes everything I say. Archives
September 2014
Categories
All
|