Fossils and not fossils

Can you tell the difference between a trace fossil and a body fossil? Hmm can you? Can you? Well T can! Body fossils being actual bits of body and trace fossils being stuff left behind by the thing that created the body fossil! So I googled images of trace and body fossils and printed them out. During my googling I came across a fab body fossil on Christian answers .net.........feck me what a load of tripe! It goes on about dinosaurs being on noah's ark.....no really and cites the proof as being that it doesn't say in the bible that they weren't.?????? Oh and it also challenges the dating of dinosaurs......coz loads of ancient human writings talk about t-rex's.....don't they? I was gobsmacked that people would tell their kids this. Admittedly be open minded but plain stark raving bonkers???? really! Anyways the pic was good so I printed out a load of pictures of different fossils ready for T to sort and stick in his Dinosaurs folder. Then we had a go at creating a fossil, now admittedly it wasn't gonna be 80 million yrs old more like 38 hours and created in our kitchen but we still had fun. We created trace fossils of dino foot print fossils with toy dinosaurs (T rex and Brachiasaurus so both veggies and meaties were equally represented!) clay, sugar and water. First we dinosaurs left footprints in the soft clay of the river bed. Then we covered the clay bed with a thick sludgey sediment (sugar and water) and then we left the sediment to settle so most of the water could be sucked off and then left it till the sugar hardened off.

Obviously this required daily prodding and finger sucking to "check" whether the sugar had set yet! But when it finally had T was finally allowed to take a hammer and one of Daddy's screwdrivers to it and chip away at the sugar until the clay bed was revealed. Once the clay was visible we used a brush to remove the loose (and slightly soggy) sugar and soon we were able to see the footprints. Oh then the fun really started as silly Mummy in her wisdom had run the hot tap on the sugar at the beginning of the exercise, by mistake, so a few of the footprints were filled by a rather lovely hardened sugar syrup but they were still very clearly visible and very clearly footprints!

First, like the true scientists we are we measured the foot prints.......Oh, I hear you cry,to estimate the size of the beast that encountered your cunning clay bed........noooooooo T is only 4 ffs we measured them coz if we wanted to we could estimate the size but we didn't want to we just wanted to know how big our t-rex and brachi's feet were....and they were 2.5am and 1.5cms respectively. So, then it was off to the sink to test the theory that sugar is water soluble and running water on to the crystallized syrup should shift it! Hampered only by the slight problem that the clay is also water soluble. Fortunately I was semi-confident that the sugar would dissolve before the clay did and thankfully I was right......note the cunning use of Daddy's pastry brush which was cleaned and returned to the drawer before any complaints could be made! Voila! A gorgeous replica of what trace fossils in the form of dinosaur foot prints might look like if dinosaurs were only 12 cms tall and had once lived in my kitchen!

......And if you could just ignore the two footprints that are still filled with sugar syrup that would be fab.......didn't want to test my clay versus sugar too much and T was getting a teeny bit heavy handed with the pastry brush!!!