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Home : 2001 : July : 6
Amber can be floated in a glass of salt water. Try having the students compare the piece of amber to a similar sized piece of plastic (I use an amber colored shirt button). The plastic will sink to the bottom of the salt water, whereas the amber will float because it is so light. Another amber experiment is to collect tree sap to examine and let it harden into an amberlike substance. Fun to see the very beginnings of the process! Have students study tree and leaf fossils. Then ask them to draw the living tree these things came from. Would it be a pine type tree? a palm? How can they tell? Petrified animal poop, called coprolite, is fun to handle. Ask students why it no longer smells. This is a good way to explain how the transfer of materials takes place in some fossils. A last thing you can try is to have students make rubbings of some of your fossils. This is not an activity to be done with very fragile or expensive samples. I have had luck having students rub petrified wood and compare it to a rubbing of live wood. We have also rubbed fish bones in rock and compared them to a trout skeleton (from last night's dinner). The idea is to let students see how these specimens were similar to and different from present-day creatures.
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