Cooking Fossils
30-45 min
5-10
What Will You Learn?
You will learn about paleontologists and types of fossils, while creating your own salt dough fossils, mixing, kneading and experimenting with figures.
Engage
A great idea, to do prior to our project, is to ask yourself, how do we know the appearance of dinosaurs only with their fossils? or what are paleontologists?
Mix Your Dough
Step 1
Mix 2 cups of flour with 1 cup of salt, in a bowl.
Step 2
Gradually add 1 cup of water, stirring as you go, until it has a dough-like consistency. Also add the coloring you want, to create your fossils.
One tip, you may not need a whole cup of water.
Knead Your Dough
Step 3
Knead your dough for at least 5 minutes. Remember to add flour to your hands and your kneading surface.
Step 4
Now roll out the dough.
Create Your Fossils
Step 5
Take your plastic dinosaur, press it into the dough, then carefully remove it and let it air dry for about 30-40 minutes.
Step 6
Your fossils are ready!
What you just created, paleontologists call a fossil mold. That’s because the sediment (the mass) formed a mold around the dinosaur’s body, keeping a trace of it. However, there are many other types of fossils. The dinosaur bones that you see arranged and built into skeletons are permineralized fossils. Compression fossils turn fern-like plants into a thin film on a rock.
Fossils are the way we know something, about the living things of the ancient world, like dinosaurs, what they were like and where they lived. Fossils only form under the right conditions, and they take a long time to make, hundreds of years
What's Next?
Try out other materials
You can experiment with other shapes or objects.
You can create a light screen, to look at your fossils in more detail, and research about the skeletons or anatomy of dinosaurs, to be like a paleontologist.
Take It Further?
You can take this further, adding electronics, creating a prehistoric badge. Using conductive materials such as string or tape, battery, some LEDs and one of the fossils that we just created, we can make an incredible circuit.
Reflection
How do we know what dinosaurs look like if no one knew them?
What are paleontologists? Have you visited a natural history museum? Have you seen any fossils? What is your favorite dinosaur? What characteristics do you know about him?
Further Resources
More info
How do you find dinosaur fossils? – American Museum of Natural History
Why isn´t Pterodactyl a Dinosaur? – American Museum of Natural History
How scientists solved this dinosaur puzzle – VOX
A World of Dinosaurs – Time for Kids
Fossil Find – Time for Kids
Dinosaurio – Google Arts & Culture
The Natural History Museum – Google Arts & Culture
About MoonMakers
MoonMakers — led by Camila and Diego Luna — are a community of creators passionate about knowledge. A Makerspace, an open space with different digital manufacturing machines. And a YouTube channel where we promote science, technology and the maker movement.
MoonMakers have collaborated with companies such as: Sesame Street, Make Community and in Mexico with Educational Television and Fundación Televisa, creating educational content.
We have given workshops throughout the Mexican Republic with: Talent Land, Secretary of Education in Jalisco, Conacyt, Centro Cultural España.
Materials:
- 2 cups flour
- 1 cup of salt
- Water
- Plastic dinosaurs
- Mixing bowl
- Food coloring (optional)
Vocabulary:
- Fossil - [dead organic substance] That has been petrified by chemical and geological processes and is found in the ancient sedimentary deposits of the earth's crust.
- paleontologists - they help to form the history of life, that is, with their studies carried out in excavations they carry out an investigation of organic remains that shows them what life was like, the climate, the environment, etc. centuries ago.
- Salt dough - is a modeling material, made of flour, salt and water. It can be used to make ornaments and sculptures.
- Sediment - is a solid material accumulated on the earth's surface derived from the actions of phenomena and processes that act in the atmosphere, in the hydrosphere and in the biosphere. Sediments can remain stable for long periods, even millions of years, until they consolidate into rocks.
