Yesterday morning I (Jessica Lawrence) and a third year University student, Richard Adams, spent some time with the third years of Portswood Primary School. We talked to them about what palaeontology, palaeontologist (like us) and fossils. Many of them knew what dinosaurs where, and even had an idea of what a fossil is! That was really exciting, and as always there were those few kids that were very eager to talk about what they knew and ask questions. We then showed them some invertebrate fossils Richard had brough with him, such as a sea urchin, ammonites, and a fern. We were then able to segway into talk about my favorite group ever…the “not dinosaurs” including ichthyosaurs!!! I brought along my palaeoplushies (they LOVED them Rebecca!!) and knitted ammonite from Lyme Regis to show them what the animals looked like in life. This was great, but they really got excited about the fossils most of all. It’s always fun when you get a unanimous “WHOOOAAAA!” when you bring out an ichthyosaur skull. They all got to touch some fossils and we even talked a bit about molds and casts, field techniques and where they can find fossils if they want to look for some. We also saw if they were taller than a hadrosaur dinosaur leg bone (tibia or fibia not sure which), unfortunately the dinosaur was bigger than them, myself, and Richard!
The first group was fresh into school and had lots of really great questions, and a lot of questions on if I had ever found a specific type of fossil like a dinosaur tooth, or a pterosaur. My favorite question of the day was when we were asked “Who found a fossil first, you or Richard?” my answer was “I probably did, only because I am older than Richard and therefore started looking for fossils before him.” . This made me happy cause they must think that I am in the same age range of Richard, not like 8 years or so older. The second group was very excited too, as they were sat on the floor and just in from recess/break. They were very chatty and were so excited about all the stuff we had I had to ask them to move back every so often so I did not step on them. They had great questions as well, and were very interested in the differences between birds/dinos/pterosaurs! Going to have to maybe bring Liz Martin along with us next time ;-)
All in all another great day of outreach, and hopefully we really helped bring this science to life for these kids!
