Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Homeschool Science: Identifying Fossil Shark Teeth

We did this project months ago, but I didn't post it because I was waiting for 1) a lovely, sunny day or 2) the spontaneous appearance of a light box to re-shoot the slightly blurry, slightly dark shark tooth photos.

That day may or may not ever come, Friends. But going into the umpeenth rainy day in a row, today, I've decided that I'm no longer going to wait for it. So my shark tooth photos are slightly blurry and slightly dark. I'll live.

Our shark tooth identification project came after our trip to Bay Front Park, in Maryland. This was one of the big treats of our sharks unit study, and after spending so long learning about sharks, Will and I, especially, were super stoked about finding ALL THE SHARK TEETH!

And after you find them, of course, you can identify them!



This was another project in itself, requiring discernment, organizational skills, and, let's face it, some imagination. I'm sure there MUST be a definitive fossil shark tooth identification guide out there somewhere, but we satisfied ourselves with the best one that we could find online, and we managed to get everything sorted-ish using it:






I'm not confident in all of our identifications, but I'm confident in many of them. A future project is to label them and mount them in our specimen boxes.

I'm just waiting for that one magical, sunny day so I can get good photos of them first!

May, perhaps?

No comments: