Our Future Paleontologist + Dinosaur Excavation Activity

We visited the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits during our visit to LA last month, an activity that turned out to be a formative experience for our daughter:

Since our visit, the grown-ups in our house have taken turns pretending to be animals stuck in the tar while our little saber tooth tiger gently nibbles on us. (Clearly, this is her idea, not ours!)

We’ve also been busy polishing our excavation skills:

In the museum gift shop we purchased this fantastic dinosaur excavation kit. (FYI: the La Brea Tar Pits formed 10,000 years ago, long after dinosaurs became extinct; however, the gift shop sold a wide variety of science activity kits, including ones with dinosaurs.)

Using a hammer and chisel (contained in the kit), we uncovered a detailed bone replica to clean and then assemble. We bought the Brachiosaurus kit, but they also sell skeletons of Triceratops, Velociraptor, Stegosaurus, T-Rex, and Pteranodon.

(Note: the magnifying glass and brush were our own; they’re not included in the kit, but we thought they were essential props for this particular activity.)

Oh, we had such fun pretending to be paleontologists!

Our daughter now refers to her assembled Brachiosaurus as a dragon skeleton since we’ve been reading Dealing with Dragons before bed each night. In our daughter’s mind, this dinosaur resembles the (friendly!) dragon Kazul. Because, as she frequently reminds me, in our imagination anything is possible.