Good morning Year 6,
Humans have been on the Earth for a very short amount of time.
Planet Earth is 4.6 billion years old. The first life began in the seas around 3.6 billion years ago. The earliest life was single-celled creatures like bacteria and algae. Gradually life became more complex and multicellular life began.
Try this:
Hold your arm out straight.
The length of your arm is the total age of the Earth
The sliver of fingernail at the end of your middle finger is the amount of time that humans have existed!
If we squash the Earth’s 3.7 billion years existence into a single 24-hour day:
•The first human species appeared about 50 seconds before midnight.
•Modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared roughly 2 seconds before midnight!
Fossils tell us a lot about living things that died millions of years ago. The parts that become fossilised can tell us about how they
looked, how big they were and even what they ate by looking at their teeth (and sometimes fossilised poo!). There are some things we can’t work out so easily, such as their skin colour or texture, as skin does not fossilise.
Areas such as Lyme Regis on the south coast of England (photo above) are excellent places for fossils. The cliffs are made of sedimentary rock, such as limestone and sandstone, that would have been at the bottom of the sea millions of years ago. Chalk cliffs are made from the skeletons of billions of microscopic sea creatures.
Creatures that died in this sea would have sunk to the bottom and in some cases become buried and eventually become fossils.
Millions of years later, the movement of the Earth’s plates pushed the sea foor upwards, forming land. Fossil sea shells have sometimes been found at the top of high mountains!
A very famous site for fossils is called the Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rockies. 500 million years ago it used to be sea foor, but now is 2000m above sea level!
Mary continued to make important new finds. She found more complete skeletons of ichthyosaurs as well as the first skeleton of Pterodactylus, and a complete skeleton of the long-necked Plesiosaurus.
Scientists acknowledged Mary as a fossil expert. Many important scientists visited and wrote to her.
Because of her important work she was made an honorary member of the Geological Society of London. This really showed how much scientists valued her work because at the time women weren’t allowed to be members!
Useful websites:
By looking at fossils and working out their ages, scientists have been able to find out when life first started. They have found no dinosaur fossil younger than 66 million years old, so that is how they know when dinosaurs became extinct.
Today’s task: research animals and fossils of your own and produce information sheets about each one.
You could present this in the form of a timeline if you decide to show more than one!
I hope you’ve learnt a lot today and we look forward to seeing your work.
Good luck!
Mrs Avdiu xx
It is not my working day so Miss Carruthers will kindly respond to the blogs today.
Printer-friendly version: Science blog Year 6 June
ALL done
Well done Nina. What did you find out?
Done! 🙂
Brilliant! What did you find out?
Hello Mrs
I have completed the work. Here are some of my facts!
When an animal dies it would usually get eaten or would decay than the conditions are just right for the left over parts of the animal to become a fossil. A simple definition of a fossil is the remains of an animal which is decayed formed. print of its bones into a rock
How interesting Elly! Check that last sentence makes sense..!
During my research about fossils, I learned that there are 5 types of fossils.
These are the names:
1.) Body Fossils
2.) Mold and Casts
3.) Petrification Fossils
4.) Footprints and Trackways
5.) Coprolites
I wonder what the difference between them are?
Hi Year 6! What interesting facts-i think fossils are fascinating!