Our Education Team visited Crystal Palace Park on 28 May to deliver a day filled with fossil fun for May’s half-term.
The Society’s team spent a great day with a family drop-in session and a workshop all about fossils, including those used to discover the Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur in history to be given a scientific description.
The morning began with fossil handling, where we chatted to over 70 children about what a fossil is and why they are important. Visitors got the chance to handle real fossils from trilobites to petrified wood, and even fossilised dinosaur poo! We were set up right by the amazing Megalosaurus dinosaur statue at the park, which was the perfect setting to talk about the discovery of this dinosaur and how further study has continued to deepen our understanding of it.
In the afternoon, we delivered an interactive workshop to 15 children focusing on fossil formation and learning more about the Megalosaurus. Aimed at children under 12, the workshop supported learning about how fossils can tell us a lot about Earth’s history: how animals lived, what their environments were like, and evidence of past climates. We used plasticine to recreate the timeline of a fossil forming, stapler removers and castanets to test out how teeth fossils give clues to what an animal ate and measured a dinosaur footprint to show the importance of trace fossils in learning more about an animal’s activity.
It was a fun-filled day of fossils. A huge thank you to Crystal Palace Park for having us!
