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| Our finished dinosaur fossils |
We learned about some of the different types of dinosaurs today and we learned some new words.
Carnivores - animals that eat meat
Herbivores - animals that eat plants
Omnivores - animals that eat both meat and plants
We learned that most dinosaurs were herbivores, some were carnivores and just a few were omnivores. Of course, many herbivores accidentally ate insects and other small animals when they chomped the leaves from the trees!
Palaeontologists are scientists that study prehistoric life. They can work out what dinosaurs ate in a few different ways. One way is to look at tooth fossils. If the teeth are pointed and long, they were probably carnivores. If they were spoon or peg shaped, they were probably herbivores who used their teeth to strip leaves from branches. Herbivore dinosaurs didn't usually chew their food. They'd swallow the leaves whole, then digest them in their stomach, sometimes with the help of stones they had swallowed to help grind the food up inside them!
When we've been learning about non-fiction books, Mrs N told us that most non-fiction books contain photographs of the subject, while fiction books usually have drawings or paintings. Today, we noticed that non-fiction books about dinosaurs don't contain any photos of real dinosaurs and we wondered why. It's because there were no cameras (or people) when the dinosaurs were alive, which means that nobody really knows that they looked like. Palaeontologists can make guesses based on their bones and other little clues left behind but we don't really know about the colours or textures of their skin. So, we discovered that non-fiction books about dinosaurs are one of the subjects that won't contain real photographs.
Love from The Smarties and Mrs N
I know one Smartie who was extremely excited to be going to the museum. I hope you all had an interesting time and enjoyed your excursion.
ReplyDeletePaige's Granny