The Yorkshire Fossil Festival was brilliant! It was in Scarborough. This picture shows Horace the pliosaur. If you get superclose and look at the picture, then you see "pliosaur" on the side, at the top of the pliosaur. There were lots of universities and associations there, and we did loads and loads of stuff.

Here are some more pictures from the festival:

We went fossil hunting afterwards. We had never been fossil hunting in Scarborough, but we found loads and loads of good stuff - but I found no fossils. Daddy found two gryphaeas and a bivalve, and Mummy found a big plant stalk....
...at least we think it is. What do you think? (Mummy edit: picture below - about as thick as Toby's arm.)

This is the fossil shop in the Heights of Abraham. And this is where you can rub over some fossils, and you can take a picture home for free. If you want to get to the Heights of Abraham, you go up in a cable car, and it is really fun. And the only way to get down is another cable car! 
There was a cave there, and that was super good. I got to take away a stone called calcite. Calcite it used for making road marks. You need to crush up the calcite, and then you can put it into paint to make it reflective. Here is a picture with with some ammonites, some trilobites, and a massive fish head.

A week ago or so, we went to the Centre for Life in Newcastle. They had lots of fossils. I loved the ammonite that's not curled all the way.

These are fossil pterodactyls. They had moving dinosaurs as well, and they were a bit scary, but not the archaeopteryx in the picture below, because that was just small, but the moving T-Rex was scary. They even had a fossilised dragonfly!

We went to London. It was the first time I went to London. This is me waiting outside the Natural History Museum. It was a really, really rainy day. Mummy got really wet. We had to wait over half an hour.

This is a picture of Dippy, the diplodocus. He is in the middle of the museum and he is super, super, super, super big!

This is an ichthyosaur head that Joseph found. Joseph is Mary Anning's brother, and Joseph is a bit older than Mary Anning. The museum had lots of fossils of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that Mary Anning found, but the picture of me, two pictures down, is with a pliosaur. It was so big that Mummy had to tilt the camera to take a picture!

This a megatherium. It was alive after the dinosaurs. While the dinosaurs were alive, mammals were as big as a mouse, but after the dinosaurs died, they grew bigger and bigger, and the megatherium was one of the biggest - it was much, much bigger than a bear!

They have lots of fossils in the museum. In this room, it was all full of fossils. They were found all over Great Britain. There was a computer that was stuck to a microscope, and you could look at fossils up close. There was another computer, and you could look up where they found the fossils.

This is an archaeopteryx. Scientists are arguing whether archaeopteryx was a dinosaur or an early bird - I think it is a dinosaur. This is what it would have looked like when it was alive.

I'm not telling you anything about this T Rex - you have to find out how scary it is when you go to London to the museum!

The picture below is a parasaurolophus fossilised skull. He could make a noise with his big horn, it sounded a bit like the fog horn of a big ship. If you go to the Dinosaurierpark in Germany, you could hear what it sounded like, or you can have a look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBU6zfI1b0U . It's a film to show how the horn worked, although it's really called a crest.  But I didn't make that film.

My best piece was when I saw the T Rex, even though it was scary. And I also liked the megatherium, and seeing all the fossils that Mary Anning found. One day, we're going to go back. It was so fun at the museum, I nearly cried when I got out, but that cry was a happy cry, I didn't want to leave!

Today we went to the Ashton Memorial. It's in Lancaster. We were taking down Mummy's exhibition at one of her follies.  As we walked up the stairs, we saw fossils! We saw shells, and one bit that might have been a coral. You can find fossils on rocks, and you can find fossils on the beach, and you can find fossils in forests, and you can find fossils on stairs!

Today we went to the Alfred Denny Museum. It's in the University of Sheffield, and you have to tell them you want to come. It's an animal museum. It's called zoology, and there are lots and lots and lots of creatures. There are some sponges and corals, and there was a dead person, and an ostrich and there was a snake and a hedgehog and a squirrel and an armadillo and a porcupine and bullfrogs and chicken embryos, and lots of other creatures.

This is half a squirrel. It has fur on one side, and it has bones on the other side. It's for students to learn what's inside the creatures. There was also half a seal, half a mole, half a bat, half a porpoise, half a hedgehog and half a bullfrog.

This is a little ichthyosaur. They had a cast of a fossil pterodactyl - the grown up and the babies are in the pictures below.

This is a terror bird. Can you see that eye? That's just a made up eye. The terror bird lived about 62-2 million years ago. It couldn't fly, but it grew taller than a person, and it was super dangerous.  I had a really, really, really, really good time, and I want to go back another day.

I went to Weston Park Museum today. A few years ago, I went to it with my pre-school, but I didn't know as much about fossils then. In this picture, I'm drawing where I can see something hiding in the ground. Archaeologists do that, and palaeontologists do it, too - and I want to be a palaeontologist. An archaeologist might draw shards and things, and a palaeontologist might draw fossils and bones, but an archaeologist might draw bones, too - but they won't be fossilised.

This tree grew in Sheffield. It was 310 million years ago. Back then, it looked like a big swamp - it might have had lots of creatures. I would love to find one of those trees!

There's a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur. The plesiosaur is the bottom one, it has a long neck. The ichthyosaur is the one on top, it's a bit squished.

My best bit was when we saw the plesiosaur, because we didn't know it was there, and with pre-school we didn't look at it.

We went fossil hunting in Port Mulgrave. We left really early in the morning, and Mummy bought some croissants to eat on the beach. It was breakfast! We found lots of fossils that we didn't take, because they were in a too-big rock. Here are some pictures.

But we did take this big, big, big one, because it was good! I held it to carry it up the hill, but Daddy carried it a lot, too. If you swipe (edit from Mummy: scroll) below, you will see the big fossils that I'm carrying in this picture.

This plant is mine, because I found it. Daddy found the fern, and Mummy found the one in the last picture. We were really happy, because we haven't found lots of plants. The lego brick is to show you how big the fossil is.

This is jet. Jet is monkey-puzzle tree that is fossilised. In Whitby, we went to an old jet carving workshop. We saw a bench and wheels to grind and smooth the jet, and one of the wheels was made of walrus leather.

This ammonite is special, because we never found one like this. Can you see the squiggly lines? We made them big in that picture below.

Daddy found this rock with lots of shells in. And he also found the shell below. Although that might be a big piece of ammonite - we don't know. It's pyrite, that's why it looks gold. Or maybe, if you look at it, it might look silver, but that's just the photo.

This is me with an ichthyosaur, but it's already fossilised. It's in a museum in York (edit from Mummy: Yorkshire Museum). It was super-big. The eye was as big as my head! There were lots of other fossils, too, like fossilised fish, fossilised footprints and some of the fossils that we found already. My best bit about the trip was seeing the ichthyosaur and walking on glass at the museum - they had a glass floor with real dinosaur footprints underneath. We're going to go back, because our ticket is good for a whole year!

Today I made an ancient rockpool! We went to Castleton and we met Gordon, and he helped me make my rockpool. First I painted it blue and green. Then I stuck down rocks while Mummy made some tubes for the corals. Gordon drew me my two trilobites, and I drew an ammonite and a fish. I stuck some wool in the corals and I put a silver piece in. My rockpool is my best creation ever!

Gordon made me two trilobite puppets. There was a big one and a small one. My best one was the big one, it was three-fingered. 

There were ammonite toys and belemnite toys, and there were even real fossils there!

If you want to, then you can read about the project: http://ancientlandscapes.blogspot.co.uk/ 

I had a really, really good time!

Yesterday, at night, I went to "Walking with Dinosaurs". It was very, very long. It was past my bedtime when we got home. There were lots of attacks. All of the attacks were my favourite. Some of the dinosaurs were robots, and some of them were people. If you see really carefully, on the ones that haven't got something between their feet to carry them, at their feet, then you might see people's legs as well as dinosaur legs. My best dinosaur was the brachiosaurus, you can see it in the picture. The Daddy one nearly touched the lights! There was a flying dinosaur, too, it was an Ornithocheirus.

First we sat behind the technicians, and that was interesting, because we could see behind the stage on a monitor that the technicians had, but then a lady asked if we would like to move somewhere else. And those were better seats. And suddenly, we found out that we were just two rows in front of my friend James! The Mummy T-Rex went RRRRRRRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRR, then the baby T-Rex went "ro..ar", and that was funny!! I was sad when it was finished, because I really liked it. I hope I can go again one day, so I can see the dinosaurs again.