Never boring: Peer into the Past

examining a tiny gastropod

We have been gearing up for our upcoming field trip. We will travel near Bryan, Texas to a fossil locality known as Stone City, where the children will do fossil field work, digging into the past to collect, identify, and tally marine (mostly invertebrate) fossils from the Eocene Epoch (about 45 million years ago) when most of Texas was covered by sea.

To prepare my young paleontologists for this task, it was important to practice safe and appropriate use of tools, as well as training their brains to recognize the shapes, patterns, and colors of some likely finds at the site.

To do this, each group received a tray of matrix collected at Stone City. They also received a set of fossil guides and the paleontology tools we will be using: brushes, forceps, a metric ruler, a sharp probe (a ceramics needle), a Sharpie, and magnifiers.

another tiny gastropod

The children combed through the matrix, using the forceps to carefully tease out tiny fossils.

tiny gastropods

Because this was a marine habitat during the Eocene Epoch, we find a lot of mollusks--mostly gastropods but also scaphopods, bivalves, and the rare cephalopod (squid "beak"). Check out how tiny these finds are!

bryozoa, coral

We also find coral, bryozoa, otoliths (~fish inner ear), ray teeth, and shark teeth.

otoliths

using a hand lens

The children examined each fossil closely.

It's a real advantage to have
a microscope in the classroom.

They practiced using the fossil guides to identify their finds.

To record and communicate their findings, each child selected some fossils for which to create fossil identification pages.

The child recorded the date, fossil locality, era, period, epoch, fossil name, and classification (phylum and class) and included a detailed illustration.