Dinosaur Fossils
The fact that some of the popular children's foods come in dinosaur shapes should tell us something. From breakfast cereal to vitamins to candy, kids love to find new ways to have dinosaurs in their lives. And when you look at the world of television and movies, you don’t have to go far to see how much children love to include a dinosaur in their entertainment. We start them out with Barney and from then on out, dinosaurs are very much part of the fantasy world of children.
As much as children love to play with dinosaurs, they love to learn about real dinosaurs even more. Unlike space aliens or Harry Potter imaginations, the thing that excites youngsters about dinosaurs is that they look like aliens but they were very much real and a big part of the history of our planet. So when any school lesson or educational show comes on about the various times in history when dinosaurs ruled the world, it is not hard to get the young people excited and fascinated. Many children become real experts in paleontology and archeology and become fascinated with how dinosaur fossils are discovered and what we can learn from them.
The excitement your children have for dinosaurs makes a trip to a local science museum a real event for the whole family. If the museum has full sized and even moving dinosaur exhibits, you will enjoy hearing that favorite phrase come from the children of "oh wow" when they walk in and see a Tyrannosaurus Rex or a Brontosaurs recreated in actual size before their eyes. A great display to find for your young dinosaur lovers is a large room where a model of a full sized dinosaur standing side by side with how that dinosaur might look if fossilized bones were connected to show how the beast could be understood more from the fossils that are discovered at archeological digs.
That kind of dramatic illustration is just the thing to create a lot of excitement when the children then go to the rooms in the museum where actual fossils are on display. By seeing a tooth, a leg bone or a jaw of an actual dinosaur, they can relate the size of that bone to what they just saw and begin to get the idea of how scientists are able to use their powers of observation and many other scientific disciplines including math to recreate what dinosaurs really looked like so many millions of years ago.
This kind of trip to the museum can light an excitement for science and the sciences in a child that can last a lifetime. You might see them playing "archeologist" in the sandbox or enjoying science kits you get for them to take that flame of interest in science and fan it into a blaze. So if those big dinosaurs do their job of turning your child into a science nut, that is a nice contribution those ancient fossils can make to our modern lives.
