The picture above is the most intriguing shot I took of our day of dinosaurs.  Whoop-Whoop.  A) I’m just not into dinosaurs.  B) My spirit was contagious that day.  Can’t win ’em all.

Still, it’s easy stuff that can be accomplished with some wet, clean sand, and plaster of Paris.  Our kit came with a leaf fossil, which we could easily discuss as a fossil, and use paper and pencil to make impressions.  We then took some wet sand, and imprinted a small dinosaur into it.  Dead dinosaur, lying on the beach.  Everyone got that visual.  Cover it with wet plaster of Paris, and when it dries, you can peel off the plaster and you’ll have a fossil (I’m not using the correct terms here…some stick out, some stick in…I wasn’t paying very close attention to the notes).  It was our favorite of the experiments.

We also buried a dinosaur, and while we waited for the plaster to dry, we did a timeline of pictures, showing how a dinosaur lived, died, and became a fossil as the topography above him changed.  He died on land, but ended up being found under what had been a lake bed at one time. It was actually pretty challenging.  But then we tried to dig up our dinosaur.  We used knives.  We used paper clips.  We used just about everything we had on hand to chip this guy out.  We flipped plaster into my eyes, and that’s when the game ended.

Not all dinosaurs WANT to be unearthed.  Amen. Pick your favorite of theories as to how they went extinct, but my personal belief (and I took an entire seminar-style class on this at Purdue University…please don’t ask me why. There is no science to choosing electives at the age of 19…) is that they simply got too big to sustain reproduce-able and sustainable life.  20 years ago that theory felt too simple to me.  Surely it was an asteroid blocking out the sun!  How sexy is that theory? But now, as I watch America grow, and grow…and grow…which is hindering reproductive health, which is shortening life spans, which is wreaking almost immeasurable havoc in healthcare…hmm…I’m just wondering if maybe there was no asteroid.  If you had to pick a country on earth who would eat itself to death first, where does your arrow lean?

Maybe I learned more from dinosaur day than I realized.  Maybe last summer’s Culinary Adventures just crossed over into my Summer of Science. It’s all connected folks!  Art, Science, Literature, THE WORLD…we’re all connected…