Explore Fossils!: With 25 Great Projects

by Cynthia Light Brown, Grace Brown, Bryan Stone (Illustrations)

In Explore Fossils! With 25 Great Projects , readers can expand their dinosaur obsessions into learning opportunities that take them beyond Triceratops , Stegosaurus , and even Tyrannosaurus rex to other animals, plants, and microbes that lived long before humans.Explore Fossils! introduces young readers to the history of life on Earth as revealed by fossils. Kids learn how fossils form and about the different types of fossils and the world of long ago--its landscape and the plants and animals that lived then. Scientists use radiometric dating to test fossils to discover when they were made, what organisms made them, what those organisms used for energy, what killed them, and a whole lot of other information. All from rocks! That's a lot of information stored under our feet.Activities include creating plaster fossils, using popcorn to illustrate radiometric dating, and exploring what might have caused mass extinctions by making a lava flow and simulating an asteroid impact.By studying the past, not only do students meet amazing plants and animals, they are also encouraged to consider their own role in geological time to make thoughtful hypotheses about the future.

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 15, 2016

About the author

Cynthia Light Brown is the author of multiple non-fiction books for children, among them, Amazing Kitchen Chemistry Projects You Can Build Yourself , Explore Fossils!: 25 Great Projects, and Explore Rocks and Minerals!: 25 Great Projects, Activities, Experiments, all from Nomad Press. Her books are consistently ranked in Amazon's top 100 in their category and have received multiple 5-star reviews.

Cynthia holds a Master’s degree in Earth and Planetary Science from the University of New Mexico and a Bachelor's degree in Geology from Williams College. She's worked for twenty-five years as an environmental consultant specializing in pollution prevention, toxicology, and risk assessment. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her husband, any of their three children who happen to be visiting, their adorable cat, Mika, and about 70,000 bees.