Jen here –
National Fossil Day is a holiday enacted in 2010 to celebrate prehistoric life. Each year museums, institutes, and organizations plan events around understanding geology, paleontology, and Earth’s history! This year, I helped plan activities for the FOSSIL project and the department of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. The annual event has all the natural history departments and several local organizations set up as a knowledge fair. Adults and children can wander around to different tables to learn about Florida’s different animals, plants, and more!
At the FOSSIL project table, we displayed real megalodon teeth, 3D printed teeth made of plastic, and digital teeth! On the myFOSSIL website you can look through a 3D gallery (click here) and move digital fossils around in your browser. We also had an app up that was developed by the iDigFossils group to estimate body size of the sharks based on their teeth! It was really fun and helped show the utility of the website!
The vertebrate paleontology table had a modern turtle shell next to ancient fossil turtle pieces! The idea was you could select a piece of shell material and try to figure out where on the turtle shell the piece was fun. This was difficult with some pieces but others were very clearly the edge of the shell or contained ribs. As many of you may know, I am not a vertebrate paleontologist so I had to quickly learn as much as I could about turtles. Shout out to my friend Jeanette for teaching me how to identify turtle shell fragments the week before the event. Many of these turtle pieces were about 5 million years old and from areas around Florida! We also had a few jaws for people to look at different teeth and then play a matching game. The game had you match different animals and teeth, then we talked with the players about diet and how we can use differently shaped teeth to think about what food the animal was eating.
I helped out at the two tables inside but outside we had a dig pit and wash pit stations. So one was where you would dig through sand to find different fossils and the other was where you would use a screen to sieve through material to find smaller fossils!
We had our National Fossil Day celebrations a bit early to coincide with the opening of a new exhibit, ‘Permian Monsters’. The Permian period is incredibly interesting because it was before dinosaurs when mammals were dominant and roaming the Earth. I was asked to be on the radio to describe the differences between dinosaurs and mammals in less than 30 seconds! At first I was thinking… what the heck am I going to say to these people but then I knew: ‘The major difference between these early mammals and dinosaurs is the amount of holes in their heads.’ The radio host lost his mind and then asked me a million questions after we were off air.
This was my first National Fossil Day at a new institution and I had a lot of fun! I hope everyone got to celebrate and share their love and knowledge for fossils!