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Making fossils
Today we unveiled our fossils from their sea bed after waiting millions of years (or in our case, a few days) for them to solidify. We did this to learn about how fossils are made. On this table, you'll find the steps that happen to create a real fossil and what we did to mimic this process (because waiting for a real fossil takes a little bit too long...).
| 1. An animal dies. It falls onto a sea bed. It is pushed down by sedimentary rock for millions of years. | 1. Our sea bed was made from plasticine. We pushed a shell into the seabed to represent the animal dying and pushed down with our hands to show the pressure of sedimentary rock. |
| 2. The animal rots away, leaving a hollow shape in the sedimentary rock. | 2. We removed the shell from the plasticine sea bed. |
| 3. Water floods into the hollow space, carrying minerals like limescale and calcium into the space. | 3. We mixed water with some plaster poured it into the space left behind by the shell. |
| 4. The water drains but the minerals are left behind. This happens time and time again over millions of years. | 4. The plaster set. |
| 5. The sedimentary rock is eroded away leaving the more hard-wearing fossil minerals behind. This leaves a cast fossil. | 5. Our plasticine sea bed rotted away (using our fingers) and we were left with a cast of the shell we pushed in originally. |
We were so impressed with our fossils and had so much fun making them. Here are some of the amazing fossils that Class 11 produced.
