The 2016 Dinosaur Week themes were mammals and microfossils. Dinosaur week got kicked off by a trip to LA where we visited the La Brea Tar Pits. Zev loved the station where researchers were using tiny brushes to sort teeny-tiny microfossils.

We took a walk through a redwood forest, with a handful of plastic dinosaurs. We pretended we were dinosaurs tromping through an ancient forest.
We built a living room dig site:

Next to our dig site was a lab for sorting microfossils. There’s a microscope (the flashlight is the light source), centrifuge, brushes, chisels and picks etc.:

We visited the Mammoth exhibit at the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.  Zev chose to pretend that the substrait that you’re supposed to brush away from the big mammal fossils was actually microfossils. So, we sorted microfossils and looked at them under the real microscopes.

We brought our brushes to the park and made a paleontology dig site in the sand box. We found a hadrosaur. We excavated the fossil bones (large sticks) and matched them to a hadrosaur skeleton. We brought a few small samples home to run a genetic analysis on in our laboratory.

After analyzing our results, we made a poster to share our research with our peers: