TRY IT! Be an amateur archaeologist!

For Parents Only! Kids do not read this Yet! (If you are a kid and you can’t help yourself, then don’t let anyone else read it until you are ready to do it, you may need to recruit one parent to help).

First you will need a picture of the skull of one fruit bat (if it is labeled, cover up the name so that no one else knows what animal it is from). You will also need a book or two that has pictures of dinosaurs (the more pictures the better), and a picture and detailed information about fruit bats.

Everyone will need a piece of paper, a writing utensil and maybe even some decorating tools like colored pencils or crayons.

Each person should put together a description and illustration of this animal based on just the skull. If you were an archaeologist and found this skull, what could you determine about it?

What type of animal do you think it is?

Is it carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore?

What did it look like?

 Draw a picture of the creature that you think this skull came from. (Those who set up the activity should not draw a picture since they already know what it is).

Compare the pictures that each person has drawn. Did two archaeologists draw the same creature?

What are the differences?

Discuss everyone’s different ideas about the skull and the animal it might have came from. How did each person come to their conclusions?

Scientists have to use a similar thought process to come to conclusions about the bones that they find. To the best of our knowledge there are no actual pictures of dinosaurs in existence, therefore all pictures that you see of dinosaurs are only guesses about what the dinosaur actually looked like.

Now, back to your drawings.  Show the picture of the live fruit bat, and compare it to the drawings made by each budding archaeologist. Discuss the differences between each person’s ideas about the animal and what we actually know about this animal.

For instance, the skull has sharp teeth, which is often assumed to be a characteristic of a meat eater, but fruit bats eat fruit!   The only way to really know about an animals habits is to watch the animal. That is something that we can not do with dinosaurs today.

Other skulls that work well for this illustration are camels and pandas.