Dinosaur National Monument Field Trip

In all my years living in Utah, I've never been to Dinosaur National Monument before! We almost didn't go this time, because it's not really on the way to…anywhere, and Sam was going to be out of town on the only weekend we had free, so I wasn't sure I wanted to drive the six hours round trip by myself! But this is a place where Homeschooling has been so good for me. Normally, I very much like staying home where it's cozy. It takes a great act of will for me to decide to get us ALL out of the house. But for some reason, when I am thinking of myself as a teacher instead of a mom, my willingness level goes up. I think to myself, "This would be the greatest field trip to teach this concept…how can I deprive my students of that chance?" :) 

So, we packed up lots of celery and almonds and apple chips (to keep me awake…my jaw ached for the whole weekend afterwards, but at least I didn't fall asleep!) and a picnic for lunch, and headed off early in the morning toward Vernal.

The drive was extra beautiful. The mountains were at their greenest and everything was glowing in the sun. Don't worry, I had my trusty assistant Abe take these pictures while we drove.

At the quarry there's a huge wall of fossils they've preserved just as they were found in the ground. It's completely covered with bones! You can touch the actual dinosaur bones in the wall. That was really cool.

There's a cute little museum with allosaurus skeletons and such. I heard somewhere that there are so many allosaurus bones in Utah, paleontologists don't even bother to collect them anymore!

The tram ride from the visitor's center up to the quarry was a big hit—so much so that we rode it up and back three times. :)

It even coaxed a smile from Mr. Grump.

I liked the dinosaur bones, of course, but my favorite thing about Dinosaur National Monument was the scenery! I didn't know there was so much cool geologic stuff to see! You can read more about it here—this whole area was a huge bed of sediments nine miles (!!) deep. Then the uplift of the Rocky Mountains, and the downcutting of the Green River, exposed those layers until you can now see more than 20 geologic as you go down the river! It's pretty amazing (and of course we couldn't see everything from the little driving around we did—you'd have to float down the river). The layer the dinosaur bones are in, the Morrison Formation, is just one of the many layers, and a relatively young one at that. There are much older rocks exposed in other layers!

This book is another great one for talking about what geologic features you can see in Dinosaur National Monument, and along the way.

Cactus rose. I told you everything was green and blooming!

The weather was awesome. We could see a rainstorm blowing in over the east mountains while we ate our picnic. It started raining just as we finished and threw away our last garbage bag!

Goldie was very excited to run through the rain :)

There are some cool petroglyphs in the area, just a little way off the road.

I love these strange, colorful formations!

There's a Natural History Museum in Vernal that we stopped at too. It's a fun museum, with activity areas for the kids and a dinosaur sculpture garden outside. 

We all tried to get Goldie to stand by this mammoth, since she loves elephants, but he made her quite nervous.

We especially liked the variety of fossils, and the huge chart along one wall showing all the geologic layers and how they were. 

And the enormous diplodocus skeleton in the lobby, of course.

The whole area around Dinosaur National Monument is really beautiful. There were a few farms on top of a plateau that overlooked the park. I can't imagine what it would be like to step outside every day and see this view:

What an amazing place! I'm so glad we live (fairly) close by!

Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur Museum Field Trip

We found a great deal on Groupon for these passes, so we'll be going to several museums for field trips this year. We visited the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point after we studied fossils. It's been several years since we've been there (the littler children have never been) so it all seemed fresh(er). There are lots of activities for the kids to do there.

I have a picture of Baby Abraham being eaten by this shark!

Unrelated to fossils, but they had one of those shadow-capture screens where it freezes your shadow on the wall. So fun.

Big bones!

The erosion table is always a favorite (and this is always the spot where I sit and nurse the baby while the older children play) :)

Fish fossils

Seb looking nervous about the huge sea turtle

Jello Fossil activity, Petrification, and Permineralization

As I prepared to teach about Sedimentary Rocks and Fossils, I was trying and trying to think of an activity that would teach about permineralization---the process during which minerals seep into the pores of dinosaur bones (or other materials) and harden, creating a hard, rock-like fossil. (As I understand it, Petrified wood and other petrified objects were first permineralized, and then some of the original material was actually replaced with minerals, until minerals are all that is left. Or, here is an even better explanation of permineralization versus petrification.)

(Also, here is a video about the petrified forest National Park that is quite interesting)

Anyway, the point is that I found lots of ideas for activities where you press a toy dinosaur into playdough and then call the impression a fossil, or put a leaf in plaster and paint it to look like stone, but none of them seemed very good at demonstrating the actual process of fossilization.

I was lying awake after Marigold's 3 a.m. feeding when it came to me like a flash of lightning. Jello! And ice! It was a brilliant idea. I will describe it.

So, I immediately got out of bed and went to the kitchen and filled several straws with water. I stuck them upright in a lump of clay, drizzled in some water, and then set them in an old spice jar and put them in the freezer.

In the morning, the straws were filled with long tubes of ice, as you can see.

Then I had Sam draw me a cute little dinosaur head, and I made a dinosaur. Here he is going on his merry Jurassic way.

The straws are his "bones."

The ice inside is the "organic material," like the bone marrow, etc.

I showed the children that the "bones" were solid, not hollow inside. They are just like the bones of an animal or dinosaur right after it dies.

Poor dinosaur! He was killed. His bones came apart. He fell into a lake bed.

Then he was covered by this "lake" of liquid jello. (I used this recipe for jello jigglers.) I told the children that the liquid jello represented mineral-rich water. The dinosaur bones sank to the bottom of the jello lake. (Actually, the bones were not heavy enough, so we had to put these knives on them to weigh them down. They have to be completely immersed in the jello solution.)

Next we put the jello in the refrigerator to set. This represented the long process of the mineral-rich water being compacted together with sediment, and forming into sedimentary rock.

When the jello was set, we pulled it out of the fridge and began to carefully excavate in the sedimentary rock.

We discovered our dinosaur's bones, and extracted them from the rock. We examined them. Were they filled with bone marrow (ice) anymore? They were not! The organic material had been replaced with another material---with minerals (jello), in fact! Instead of our dinosaur bones, we now had these permineralized fossil bones! (We squeezed them out of the straws to ascertain that they were, in fact, made of a wholly different substance than they had been made of at the beginning. The ice had melted and been replaced with jello!)

The jello actually proved to be a very good medium for demonstrating other fossil types as well. There were these knives, preserved intact in the substance, much like insects preserved in amber.

And there were these impressions left by the "bones," perfect molds, much like dinosaur footprints or other impression fossils.

If I were doing this activity again, I would put even more objects in the jello. It was really fun for the children to "dig" for these fossils and separate them from the "rock," and it was quite an effective way to teach the concepts of casts and molds as well. But I think the permineralization object lesson was the best part---it worked just as I wanted it to and it was a memorable way for us to remember that concept!