Scientific innovations continually provide us with new means of analyzing the finds.
Richard Leakey
What can we say, fossils are just cool. Paleontology, the study of fossils, mixes history, geology, physics, and treasure hunting into one fascinating subject that sparks the dreams of many including gold medalist Bryony Page from Great Britain. Listen to a BBC interview she gave a few years ago after her silver medal about her studies of dinosaur sounds. She is living proof that parents should not underestimate the importance of digging in the dirt and jumping on trampolines.
Dinosaurs can spark the imagination of all ages, and while not all fossils are dinosaur fossils, finding one can be the thrill of a lifetime. In 2022, three kids who had been fossil hunting for years were fortunate to learn just how exciting it is when they found a T-rex fossil in the Badlands of South Dakota. A family friend, paleontologist Dr. Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, helped them identify and properly excavate the fossils. Watch how it was done:
Science Olympiad’s Fossils Event
Science Olympiad’s Fossil event, one of the events for the 2025 season, will have students learning in depth about fossils including how they are formed, when they were formed and how we can know these things. Fossil teams will learn about fossil identification, geology, history, and more as they build a binder for the competitions.
Prehistory: How Old is OLD?
Scientists have measured the age of our Earth and Solar System to be about 4.6 billion years. This is a huge number. In fact it is so large, we have trouble understanding exactly how large that number is. Sure we can write it out 4,600,000,000 but our minds aren’t used to seeing groups of things in such large quantities in our day to day life. The video below will give you some ways to picture this huge number by comparing it to things we are more familiar with, a single calendar year, a stack of papers, or the life span of a teen.
How do scientists know?
There are lots of ways to date things. The best way to see how old something is, is to find something about it that changes in a steady and secure way. If I were to start a stopwatch that could run forever and bury it in my backyard, someone could then dig it up later and read it to tell how long it had been buried. But this only works if we are certain the stopwatch has been running steadily with no way to speed up or slow down, and it is the same stopwatch that was placed in the box at the beginning, in other words it didn’t leave the box and have a new one placed in it. Radiometric dating can be used in this way for certain items. Isotopes that decay do so at a highly constant rate, so they run steadily, and as long as there was no way for them to be removed or added, like being trapped in rock or fossil form, then they can be used just like the stopwatch.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to preparing for Science Olympiad’s Fossils. Check back later for more information and learning guides on this event.