My child recently had a birthday. She LOVES paleontology, so she wanted a paleontology themed party, and I was in charge of activities. I thought about doing a “dig up your own fossil” project, but she’s done a lot of those, and they can take a while to complete. Not the best idea for a party full of kindergartners either eagerly anticipating cake or recently having ingested cake.
A few days before the party, I still didn’t have any grand ideas. We had some plastic dinosaur fossils as party favors, but I couldn’t think of any game involving them that didn’t also involve destroying our yard. Instead I borrowed my idea from Halloween: build your own monster dinosaur out of Play-Doh! It would be fun, but not strictly paleontologically themed.
A friend of mine who is in the field once told me that paleontology sits at the intersection of geology and anatomy. So there I was, staring at plastic dinosaur skeletons and a bunch of Play-Doh and mulling over my options when inspiration struck! Why don’t we flesh out our own dinosaurs by smooshing Play-Doh onto the skeletons. Perfect! It would be fun and messy, but not too hard to clean up after. Also, it would give me the chance to talk about how paleontologists have to look at the bones and then try to figure out what the animals looked like on the outside by modeling the fleshy portions.
We had a wide variety of Doh colors to choose from, and each kid got to pick their favorite dino fossil. Then they went at it. Some tried to make realistic dinos, while others went for goofy (e.g. the Sweatersaurus who had evolved to survive the cold ice age). The party girl had recently been to the La Brea Tar Pits, so she spread out the black Doh and then walked her dinosaur into it so it could get stuck. Another girl didn’t want to get her fossil messy, so she made a flat piece of Doh, then make footprints. That was another teachable moment, since scientists often study fossilized footprints to learn about anatomy (the gait information can help figure out how the bones went together).
All in all, the kids had a great time and took home their own creations — hypotheses about how the dinosaurs actually looked. If you’re curious, the Play-Doh came off pretty easily, so the whole project is reusable. We’ll definitely be doing it again.
If you want to try it yourself, here’s what we used:
One of the primary ways to turn your kids onto science is to train them to think like a scientist. You want them to try something, then make a little change and then try it again and notice the difference. By the way, the same is true for engineering.
