School Buildings and Yard Inspire Study of Rock Types

With rocks and fossils now part of the Year 3 science curriculum in England, teachers may be thinking of purchasing expensive mineral sets to help demonstrate different rock types.  These of course have their place, but our dinosaur experts suggest that a quick tour of the school should be conducted as you probably have a whole range of different rocks and structures on display and available as examples.  Gravel from a path can help demonstrate how rocks erode and explain the action of water on the polishing of rocks as well as transportation and re-deposition.

Rock Types

In addition, a simple brick wall can be used to demonstrate how sedimentary rocks form layers that build up with the oldest rocks deposited first (not withstanding any geological movements and so forth).

You might be lucky to have fantastic walls such as this one, spotted by one of our teachers whilst delivering a workshop about fossils to a primary school in Cumbria.  An ideal example that can be used when studying rocks and fossils with Year 3.

A Wall Makes A Wonderful Example When Discussing Rocks

A crinoid stem exposed in a stone wall at Mynydd Marian nature reserve. Walls can help to explain deposition.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Explaining About Sedimentary Rocks

This stone wall made of slate was just what was needed to help explain how metamorphic rocks can form from sedimentary ones.  Helping Year 3 study fossils and rocks.

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Lesson Plan – How Do Fossils Form?

Everything Dinosaur team members have created this simple lesson plan that can be set up as a  class experiment for part of a science week or term topic exploring rocks and fossils.  Using very basic resources, the process of permineralisation can be demonstrated in a classroom, one of the key factors in petrifaction, the process of fossilisation.  Living things have lots of pores and open spaces in them.  Even hard parts of an organism such as wood, teeth and bones are full of holes.  It is these holes that can become filled with minerals that help in the process of turning organic matter into a fossil.

Everything Dinosaur Lesson Plan

There are many different types of fossil, trace fossils, natural casts, internal moulds, external moulds and so forth but how to demonstrate to a class the fossilisation process?

Lesson Plan Experiment – Observable Movement of Coloured Water up a Celery Stalk to Prove that Open Spaces in Living Things Can be Permineralised

Resources

• Celery stalks (with leaves on if possible)
• Glass or clear plastic beaker
• Food colouring (just a few drops – blue or red works best)
• Magnifying glasses for the children to study the celery stalks closely and to observe the change in colour
• Simple chopping tool to trim the celery stalks
• Ruler to measure the length of the stalks used
• Tap water

Resources for the How Fossils Form Experiment

Experiment to demonstrate how do fossils form?

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Structuring the Lesson

Divide the class into groups and give each group a set of the above resources.  Explain using pictures of fossils (available free of charge from Everything Dinosaur), what fossils are, stress that many fossils are the remains of once living things that have been turned to stone (petrifaction).  The celery’s vascular transport system can be used to demonstrate that living things are not solid objects but have many open spaces and pores in them.

By placing a stalk of celery into coloured water and observing the change in colour, this experiment demonstrates this principle very nicely.  The ruler can be used to measure the length of the stalks, and the magnifying glasses can assist with the children’s observation of the structure of the plant and the movement of the coloured dye via the xylem.

Overnight Dramatic Changes Can Be Seen

If a camera or Ipad is handy a visual record of the change can be made.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The children can record what they observe during the course of the day and the experiment can be left overnight or even for longer if required.

For more detailed information about this lesson and for further information about fossil formation: How Do Fossils Form?

A Close up of a Dinosaur Bone Shows the Internal Structure

The internal structure of the dinosaur bone can be seen.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Extension Ideas

1. Why was it easier to see the colour change in the leaves and not the stalks?  Hint – links to the functions of different parts of the plant
2. What happens to the softer parts of animals?  Do they fossilise?
3. What examples of fossils formed from the soft parts of animals and plants can the students find?  More able pupils can be asked to work out what conditions are needed for soft parts to turn to fossils.
4. Can the class think up examples of other types of fossil – footprints, fossils of shells, fossilised wood etc?

By keeping a record of this experiment it will work in nicely when it comes to exploring the roles of different parts of the plant.

National Curriculum (England) Coverage

St Joseph and St Bede R. C. Primary Explore Dinosaurs

As a term topic, studying dinosaurs at Key Stage 1 lends itself to all kinds of imaginative and creative learning activities.  The teaching team for Year 2 at St Joseph and St Bede R. C. Primary school have provided an example of this with an extension activity organised in co-operation with Everything Dinosaur team members following our visit to the school.

Dinosaur Workshop

During the dinosaur workshop we explained that as far as we know, all dinosaurs hatched from eggs.  Working in collaboration with the Year 2 teachers, we pretended to have left behind some dinosaur eggs after we had finished packing up our fossils and other equipment.  The  children wrote informing us about the eggs (helpful exercise regarding sentence construction, spelling, format of letter and so forth), we agreed that it would be a good idea if they looked after the eggs for us.

Disaster has struck!  Earlier this week the children discovered that an egg had hatched and that the baby dinosaur had disappeared.  The pupils then created their own comic strips all about their “Dinosaur Disaster”.

Dinosaur Disaster at Primary School

Picture credit: Year 2 St Joseph and St Bede Primary School

This is a great example of an extension activity.  The children are encouraged to investigate, explore ideas and to use different media to tell a story.  We suspect that the school’s baby dinosaur is going to have lots of adventures and thanks to photoshop, it is going to turn up in some amazing parts of the world.  Postcards sent to the school by the dinosaur will then act as a catalyst to introduce other subject areas into the scheme of work.

Visit Everything Dinosaur’s user friendly website: Visit Everything Dinosaur.

Scientists Demonstrate how Dinosaur Arms Evolved into the Wings of Birds

A team of researchers based at the University of Chile (Santiago, Chile) have resolved a mystery surrounding one of the anatomical puzzles related to the theory that birds are descended from meat-eating dinosaurs.  Whilst it is now widely accepted that modern birds are descended from a group of dinosaurs called the theropods, the wrist bones of many dinosaurs including members of the Theropoda are very different from the wrist bones of birds.  Many types of early dinosaur had nine wrist bones, birds today, only have four.  Can the theory of evolution explain these changes?

Robust, Strong Immobile Wrists of Dinosaurs Versus the Hyper-flexible Wrist of Aves

The dinosaurs which are most closely related to modern birds walked on their hind feet.  Their forelimbs were not involved in locomotion.  They became adapted for a number of functions, primarily related to food gathering.  Most of the theropod dinosaurs were meat-eaters.  The wrist evolved as a relatively strong and immobile joint to help subdue prey or to assist in attacking other animals.

The wrist joint in birds helps to manage the forces involved in the movements of the wing in flight.  They also permit the wings to be folded back when the bird is not flying, so how the wrist bones of dinosaurs evolved into the specialised and highly modified wrist bones of birds has been the subject of much debate.

 The Evolution of Dinosaurs to Birds

The evolution of a wrist bone adapted to flight.

Picture credit: Davide Bonnadonna.

Two Distinct Research Techniques

The University of Chile team, published a paper in October 2014, that used two distinct research techniques to help solve the mystery of why dinosaur wrist bones are very different from the wrist bones of birds.

• Technique 1 – staining proteins in the developing embryos of extant birds and reptiles to see how the wrist bones are formed
• Technique 2 – studying the fossilised wrist bones from dinosaurs and extinct birds

Mapping Evolutionary Changes

The scientists were able to map evolutionary changes in the Dinosauria and primitive birds that showed how wrist bones evolved over time to resemble those bones found in birds.  The embryo studies, using the newly developed technique of whole-mount immunostaining, showed that one of the wrist bones found in birds, the semilunate had actually formed from two fused dinosaur bones (distal carpal 1 and distal carpal 2).

Mapping the Evolution of Bones in the Wrist (Dinosaurs to Birds)

From dinosaur wrist bones to the wrist bones of birds.

Picture credit: PLOS Biology

The above chart shows the phylogenetic relationship diagram that helps explain how dinosaur wrist bones evolved eventually into the four, square-shaped bones found in the wrist of a modern bird (chicken).  The coloured bones relate to bones found in modern birds.

Dinosaur Arms

The Early Jurassic dinosaur called Heterodontosaurus, is believed not to be very closely related to modern birds.  Heterodontosaurus was an ornithopod, not a theropod.  It had a total of nine bones in its wrist.

There are some similarities between this dinosaur and the wrists of birds, but Heterodontosaurus may also have used its forelimbs for walking.  Coelophysis from the Triassic was a theropod and therefore more closely related to birds. This dinosaur was very probably entirely bipedal.  Note in the evolutionary diagram above, the presence of a small red bone located close to the ulna arm bone in both Heterodontosaurus and Coelophysis. This is the pisiform bone, a pea-shaped bone found in birds but not in later theropod dinosaurs such as Allosaurus, Guanlong, Deinonychus and Yixianosaurus.

An Illustration of Coelophysis (Scale Drawing)

A scale drawing of the Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The South American research team discovered that some bones in the wrist of dinosaurs were lost, some fused to form a single bone as seen in birds today and the pisiform, once lost in the Dinosauria, re-evolved as the wrist became adapted to accommodate the forces associated with powered flight.

A New Research Technique

The newly developed technique of whole-mount immunostaining permitted the research team to see how proteins grouped together in embryonic birds to form cartilage that later became bone.  The semilunate bone (yellow and green in the diagram) starts of as two separate areas of cartilage in the embryo which then fuse to form a single bone.  Palaeontologists have long believed that that semilunate bone is a fusing of two wrist bones from the ancestral dinosaurs (distal carpal 1 and distal carpal 2), this new research seems to support this theory.

The study also produced an interesting surprise, when they discovered a wrist bone called the pisiform (in red in the diagram), which was present in the ornithopod Heterodontosaurus and primitive theropods but later disappeared in more advanced theropods from the Jurassic and Cretaceous.

Commenting on this discovery, lead author of the research paper, Dr Alexander Vargas stated:

“We think the pisiform was lost when dinosaurs became bipedal.  Quadrupedal animals used this bone because they walk with their forelimbs, but bipedal dinosaurs no longer walked with their forelimbs and lost the bone. However they regained it when they began using their forelimbs for locomotion in flight.”

Mapping Proteins

New techniques such as the mapping of proteins in embryos using whole-mount immunostaining demonstrates an evolutionary lineage from those theropod dinosaurs most closely related to birds and the four wrist bones found today in modern birds.

Extension Ideas Key Stage 3 Evolution (Birds Evolved from Dinosaurs)

• Have the class gather together pictures of birds and illustrations of dinosaurs – what anatomical similarities are there – scales on feet, feathers, three-toes, claws etc.
• Examine pictures of dinosaur  (Theropoda) skeletons and the skeletons of extant Aves – what anatomical similarities can now be seen – wish bones, claws, limb bone assemblage etc.
• Using information related to the discovery of Archaeopteryx, what does this state about dinosaur/bird evolution?