Are you feeling curious?

Yeah!

I'm so glad.

Today on Curious Crew.

Don't be petrified.

We dig up more than just dinosaurs.

It's rock solid investigating the formation of fossils from millions of years ago.

Yeah.

Back in time.

support for Curious Crew is provided by MSU Federal Credit Union, offering a variety of accounts for children and teens of all ages while teaching lifelong saving habits.

More information is available at MSUFCU.org Also by the Consumers Energy Foundation, dedicated to ensuring Michigan residents have access to world class educational resources by investing in nonprofits committed to education and career readiness.

More information is available at consumersenergy.com/foundation and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Rob Stephenson and this is Curious Crew.

Welcome to the show everybody.

We always like to start every episode with a couple of discrepant events because discrepant events stimulate curiosity!

That's exactly right.

And I've got some fun ones for you today.

And in fact, I'm going to ask two of you to help me out.

Max and Aarti I'm going to have you help me out.

I have a mystery item underneath this container, and I'm going to reveal it to you and you're both going to describe it, but you're going to be observing it differently.

Max, you're just going to be able to look at it.

And Aarti, you're going to be able to touch it.

Now because I only want you to touch it.

I don't want you to hear what Max is going to say and I don't want you to be able to see it.

So I'm going to ask you to put on a blindfold, some earplugs and even a headphone.

Go ahead and get started on that.

And I will tell you when I am ready for you to take off the headphones, I will tap you on the shoulder.

You can take off the headphones, take out the earplugs, but I don't want you to and I'll get rid of hand you this other ones.

You can't even see where it is.

Excellent job.

The rest of us will be quiet so we don't give anything away to Aarti too soon.

Okay.

And, Aarti, here are the headphones.

And I'm going to reveal this while you get that on.

Okay, Now Max use some describing words and tell me what you see here.

Well, it looks like a jagged cylinder to me.

I see some dirt on it.

I think it was probably dug up.

Okay.

What do you think this is?

I think it looks like wood.

Looks like wood.

Okay, so now we can take off the headphones.

Here.

You can take out your earplugs if you can hear that.

Okay.

I am going to place an item in your hands.

Put your hands right there and you can manipulate this.

Touch it and describe it for me.

It's hard.

It's hard.

Excellent.

And cold.

And it has kind of like a rough surface.

Okay.

What do you think it is, Aarti?

It's like a rock.

Feels like rock.

Okay, Go ahead and take off the blindfold.

Now so you're aware Max said this was wood.

Aarti says it's a rock.

Wood or rock?

That's kind of strange.

I have something else I want to show you.

And Julia, can you help me out with this?

Could you take a look at that little item right there and tell me what you see inside?

It looks like a hair from an animal.

Any guess what kind of animal might have hair that looks like that?

Maybe like a saber tooth tiger.

Maybe like a saber tooth tiger.

Ooh, that's a fun idea.

I'm going to tell you, this hair is 20,000 years old.

20,000 years old.

Now, that's perplexing.

How can we have hair that's been around for 20,000 years?

We've got some interesting discrepant events here.

I'm going to invite three of you to do a little scientific modeling to see if you can explain these by the end of the show.

You can use your background, knowledge, evidence you learn to revise your thinking.

Okay, who would like to do some modeling moments today?

Okay.

Ilaria, Julia, and Ekaansh.

Okay.

Does anybody have a guess we're going to be investigating today?

I've got quite a few things on the table that might be giving you a clue.

Max, What do you think?

By the looks of it, I think we're going to be investigating something to do with fossils.

Great.

So grab your paleontology tools.

It's time to go back in time.

The history of fossils.

Let's see if we can figure this out.

It surprised me at that.

Max said Wood and Aarti said rock.

That made me want to touch it myself.

Me too.

The Wooly Wonder was confusing.

Dr.

Rob said we're investigating fossils.

How is hair a fossil?

I was wondering about that too.

When I hear the word fossil, I think about ancient bones.

Like from a dinosaur.

Fossils are naturally occurring.

Evidence of living things from long ago.

They include both plants and animals and often are from species that are extinct like dinosaurs.

When we think of fossils, we usually think about bones and teeth that have turned into stone over time.

But there are other examples too.

These include ancient sea creatures, plants, trees, shells, hair, insects in amber And even imprints of animal tracks, skin or feathers.

Fossils can tell us a lot about the history of Earth and how things have changed over time.

So thanks again, Aarti.

I appreciate your willingness to be blindfolded there.

So you've all been investigating some fossils.

I know you've got a guide that you've been sort of identifying some things.

Aarti What is one of the ones that you discovered?

I discovered a sea snail.

Sea snail.

Excellent.

How about you Ekannsh?

Shark tooth.

Nice.

And Julia?

I found branch coral.

Branch Coral.

That sort of reminds me of mine over here.

This is like hexagon aria.

We often refer to this as a Petoskey stone, which is beautiful.

Nice and polished.

Now, something I'm wondering about, What do these things have in common?

Where are these fossils coming from?

Julia, Do you know?

The ocean.

Yeah.

So these are all marine fossils.

Now, this is really strange.

99% of the fossils that you're going to find out there are going to be coming from marine life, which kind of makes sense.

Let's think about why the way fossils are formed.

If we could take a living thing, have it die and then get covered in sediment and water, it potentially could fossilize, especially the hard parts of the body.

And marine animals already live in water, so they're more common.

We're going to find those fossils.

But I've got some other big ones over here.

We've got this huge piece of coral right here.

This is a cephalopod which is going to be in the same family as a squid or an octopus or a cuttlefish.

And you can even notice this beautiful fossilized fish right there.

So now I'm wondering about land fossils.

These are a little more rare.

Take a look at that giant thing right there.

That is the mandible, a jawbone from a mastodon.

And in fact, the thing in front of it is a tooth.

One tooth to a mastodon.

Julia, touch that for me.

Describe that.

What does that thing feel like?

It feels like a rock.

Which kind of makes sense, right?

If we can get this material buried underwater, it can actually fossilize.

Now, I even have something older still.

Let me start with this one.

If you look close, this is an eggshell fragment from a saltasaurus dinosaur.

This is 75 million years old.

That's incredibly old.

Okay.

How about this one?

A plate to a stegosaurus.

This is 150 million years old.

Now, I have asked you a question because we've got some land fossils here.

So what can we infer about where these land animals might have died?

What do you think Aarti?

I think they might have died near oceans, rivers, seas.

Great.

So near water.

And in fact, it could be like a floodplain.

And they died and then suddenly get covered up.

Amazing.

So the exciting thing about fossils is 99% of them are coming from marine life.

But if you can find a terrestrial treasure from a land fossil, then you've got something really special.

Finding a fossil is a special event because not everything that dies turns into a fossil.

In fact, fossils are quite rare since most dead things just rot away.

Sometimes after something dies, it quickly gets buried by sediment like mud, sand or silt.

Over time, more layers of sediment pile on, adding a lot of pressure while mineral rich water seeps into the shells, bones and teeth turning them into stone.

The process of fossilization can take thousands or even millions of years.

Now that's special.

So we just looked at a lot of marine fossils and terrestrial fossils.

But I want to be thinking about plants as well.

Max, what do you think I have right here?

I think it looks like pieces of petrified wood.

You are exactly right.

These are pieces of petrified wood.

And in fact, this whole process of becoming petrified or turning to stone is called permineralization.

And we're going to actually try to conduct this ourselves with a piece of paper towel.

Oh, you'll see.

So first of all, what have we got in the cup here Stella?

Two tablespoons of water.

Exactly.

And Bilal in the little container beside it.

We have one tablespoon of salt.

Exactly.

Epsom salt to be exact.

Now what I'm going to ask you guys to do is we're going to pour the salt into the cup and I'm going to have you stir it up.

Okay, So let's go ahead and do that.

All right?

Now what I'd like you to do is take your cup and pour the solution right into the bowl there.

Okay.

It's got a nice little salt water solution.

Excellent job.

Okay.

The next step is I'm going to have you take this paper towel, fold it in half, go ahead and do that, and we're going to fold it in half one more time and then we're going to form a tight little cylinder.

Okay.

And if you want to, you can even take your cylinder and swipe it around just inside your cup.

If you have some salt that's still inside your cup, you can get some of it off onto your paper towel as well.

Good job.

Nice.

And then what I'm going to ask you to do is to put your cylinder down inside the bowl and roll it around so you can get it nice and saturated and I've got a question for you.

Stella If we keep this in there for about a week, what do you think might happen?

Well, might evaporate the water.

Okay, excellent.

So it might evaporate the water.

Now, in fact, I've actually done this, and I'm going to show you the one that I've left in there for a week.

And, Max, I want you to touch it and describe that.

It's like rock solid.

It's rock solid.

Now let's think about what's going on here.

It started out as this little piece of paper towel, but all of the salt water has now entered into the fibers.

And just as you predicted, the water evaporated out, but it left the salt and that crystallized and hardens.

So I also did it with a sponge.

Check this one out that almost hurt my finger.

Now, what I did here is I melted wax and I poured it inside and it filled up all of those voids that are there.

So this one still nice and squishy, but this one not so much.

This is very similar to what happens to wood when it's submerged in mineral rich water.

That silicate actually sneaks in, fills in those fibers.

It might be with quartz or calcite or pyrite, and it hardens and eventually will either trap the material, the organic material, or replace it, and you end up with petrified wood.

Now, notice how there's different colors.

Do you see the different colors here?

You often don't see trees that look like that.

That's because there might be other elements present like iron, copper, manganese.

But I'm really excited about this one.

Do you know why?

Why?

It's black.

And what does that tell me?

That tells me that a lot of the original organic cell walls are still present in that petrified piece of wood.

That's cool.

Really, really cool.

Try making your own petrified paper and you can peruse the process of permineralization yourself.

Fossils develop under sediment pressure and mineral water, so 99% of found fossils are aquatic.

But there are places where you can see plentiful land fossils.

200 million years ago, in Arizona, a forest of logs was washed into a river system and buried water, and silica seeped into the logs and turned them into stone.

Petrified wood.

A similar phenomenon happened 150 million years ago to a group of dinosaurs in Utah who died during a drought.

Later, floods buried all their bones together and fossilized them.

Our national parks can be a terrific place to see fossils Curious Crew is a great way for kids at home to learn about science.

Whoa, whoa!

Dr.

Rob creates these experiments that are very engaging, and because they're materials that you can find at home there easy to recreate.

Oh!

We have topics varying from food science to the human body to nature to the weather.

You can learn so many different things, things you've never heard about or thought about before.

Bye-bye Hoberman's sphere.

It teaches you, that science is all around you in your everyday life.

Very nice!

And I finally fit it through here.

The struggle.

I love doing hands on things and it makes me feel like more involved with science and makes it fun because it's a learning show we're able to have fun but also get something out of it in the end.

This is what science should be.

Science should be fun.

STEM Challenge.

so you've been having fun investigating fossils today?

Yeah.

I'm so glad you might remember, Stanley, our saber tooth tiger from the opening of the show.

Now, this is a really interesting fossil because this is a cast of the actual skull of the saber tooth tiger, which is pretty cool.

Now, you are going to make cast replicas yourself.

You've each selected two different molds and in your cups there you've got some plaster and some water.

Are you ready to start making your casts?

Yeah.

All right, go for it.

You guys wanna start mixing.

Yeah, let's start mixing.

I'll do this one.

Yeah, you can do that one.

And you can pour them in.

Yea, I'll pour.

Dr.

Rob is having us make some plaster molds of fossils today.

Okay, Bilal do you want to pour the water in?

Yeah, sure.

The materials that we are using are water, plaster, a silicone mold and a popsicle stick.

Oh, wow.

it's mostly dissolving into, like, a liquid.

We poured water into the plaster and we mixed it, and then we poured into the mold and then we let it set.

I shake the air bubbles out of them.

Yeah, shake.

and in 40 minutes, it's going to dry.

The most prominent challenges my table is facing was just getting the right consistency of our plaster.

It's changing from like a powder into like a liquid.

One of the challenges that we're facing is overflowing the silicone mold.

Oh, overflowed.

I think the finished product turned out really good because you could easily see what fossil it was supposed to be.

Let's just make sure the air bubbles are out.

And I think we have our casts.

I think it's pretty cool to be investigating fossils because they tell us a little bit about our past and now we just have to wait for the cast to set.

Yeah, we should be good.

Okay.

Looks like you've got the plaster in the molds.

We're going to let the set up and we're going to do a little bit of research on each of the fossils.

This should be pretty interesting.

So I can see you all have your cast replicas out of the molds.

And I'm really curious to learn a little bit more about each of your fossils.

Let's start with your table over there.

Julia.

What replicas did you do?

Well, this is the Ammonite Marine Mollusk, which went extinct over 65 million years ago.

Whoa, That's a very long time.

And what was your other one?

The shark tooth from the carcharodon megalodon.

This shark weighed about 50 tons.

Whoa.

That is huge.

Okay.

And you can tell big tooth, big shark makes sense.

Let's take a look at the second table.

Bilal, what was one of the replicas you had?

My replica was the trilobite that went extinct 245 million years ago.

That is another really, really old one.

Trilobites are amazing.

And what was the second one that you did?

the second one is a Deinonychus claw, which weighed 150 to 175 pounds.

Oh my gosh, that's about my weight.

175 pounds.

But I do not have a claw that looks like that.

Amazing.

Nice job, you guys.

And let's take a look at the last table.

Stella tell us a little bit about your fossils.

So here we have the crinoid it's a flower-like marine animal.

Nice.

And over here we have a Cave Bear tooth is from about 80,000 years ago.

Wow.

Great job, crew.

Now, the neatest thing about making fossil replicas out of plaster is you can actually paint them too, and make it look more like the living thing when it was alive long ago.

So if you come across a fossil yourself, do like the crew did, do a little bit of research, see if you can learn a little bit more about how that living thing survived on the earth and how it interacted with the environment.

Imagine you were a paleontologist.

Your job would be to look for fossils and study them to learn how animals plants in the earth have changed over time.

Our earth is constantly changing where once it was wet, adding layer and layer of sediment later might be dry.

In time that ground would start to erode revealing buried fossils.

That means if a paleontologist were to dig there, they might find different layers of fossils.

The deeper they dig, the older the fossils as old as 600 million years.

And that's called the fossil record.

Amazing.

So one the kind of fossils we haven't really talked about are called trace fossils.

I've got a great example of one right here.

Krishaan, do you have any guess what might have made this footprint?

It looks like some sort of dinosaur made it.

You're exactly right.

This is an Allosaurus and those things lived like 145 million years ago.

You can touch it if you want to.

It's kind of amazing.

Go ahead reach on in there.

It's kind of cool.

Now, this is a cast, it's a negative cast of the footprint, but this is an actual dinosaur footprint, which is amazing.

So you can imagine the allosaurus walking along and stepping in soft sediment and all of a sudden those footprints are there and get preserved.

And in fact, it's possible that sediment can even fill in the footprint and you end up having a cast of the footprint itself, which is kind of amazing.

Now, what I'm going to ask you guys to do, we have some salt dough and I invite you to make your own impressions, some trace fossils yourself.

Go ahead, grab some of those items, press those in there and see what kind of impressions you want to make.

Oh, those are looking pretty cool.

Now, what's amazing about trace fossils, you guys, is this is going to be evidence that living things were there.

Right?

And so we often think in terms of tracks, which is just amazing.

Whenever we can find a trace fossil, it's good indication of what life was like for that animal back in that time in history.

I have something else I want you to explore.

Take a look inside this little viewfinder.

Julia.

You guys look in yours as well.

Julia, what do you see in there?

It looks like some kind of mosquito trapped inside some amber.

Okay some amber inside that and kind of guess how long it's been in there Ilaria?

A million years.

This might surprise you.

Try 40 million years.

These insects are 40 million years old.

You might be wondering, how does that even happen?

Well, if we could go back 40 million years to Lithuania, we can imagine these trees would ooze out this sticky sap and the mosquitoes and the spiders would get stuck in it and they couldn't get out.

Now, eventually those trees got swept away, buried in water and fossilized, but it turned the sap into permanent gemstones where the insects were trapped.

Looking at Amber is an amazing way to look back in time, and in this case, 40 million years back in time, the crew has explored several extremely old stone fossils, as well as ancient fossilized insects encased in amber.

Remember, a fossil is any natural evidence of past life, so fossils can be more recent too.

Paleontologists have found 10000 to 100000 year old Ice Age fossils in uncemented sedimentary deposits and even ancient animals fully preserved in permafrost like the wooly mammoth, bison, ancient horse, lions and wolves.

No matter the age, fossils help us understand a lot about Earth's history.

Fossils are fascinating.

Are you curious about careers in science?

Hi, I'm Callan.

And today I'm here with Stacy Camp.

Stacy, can you tell us where we are and what you do?

I am an archeologist, an anthropologist here at Michigan State University.

That's so cool.

Anthropology is a huge field that essentially studies people in the past and in the present.

There are a lot of different subfields and archeology is one of them.

So archeologists work both in the field and in the lab.

We often get called out to archeological sites where we'll excavate them and document them.

All right.

These signs here on the ground penetrating radar might show us the outline of a building.

Why are you so passionate about your job?

One of the things that I absolutely love about my job is working with students.

You want to give it a try?

Sure.

Excellent.

All right.

Trade places.

Okay, Let's go.

I love training future archeologists.

I'm really digging how STEM is involved in archeology.

Thanks to Stacy Camp.

Explore your possibilities.

Now back to Curious Crew.

So that rocky wood must have been petrified wood and it had to have been underwater for a very long time.

I was thinking it was similar to the petrified paper that got hard too once it dried out.

Yeah, because the salt got into the fibers and crystallized.

So now we know that fossils are more than just bones.

They're any evidence of a living thing.

Yeah.

So hair is a fossil too, from an ancient mammal.

So have you had fun investigating fossils today.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm so glad.

It's now time to return to our discrepant events.

And I'm sure you were petrified to try to figure this out.

Sorry to figure these out, but you might have an impression that you've got an answer.

Okay.

So wood or rock?

Julia, what have we figured out here?

Well, we think that this is a good example of petrified wood.

Because it looks like wood, but it feels like a rock.

Yeah, we think the tree fell down, got buried, and then covered in mineral rich waters that petrified the wood.

Nice.

Now, that process, this might surprise you can take 5 to 10000 years.

That's an incredibly long time and once it's submerged we have silicate that gets into the fibers and it can be quartz or calcite or pyrite or opal, and that hardens.

The amazing thing, though, is it will trap that organic material and either trap it or replace it.

So it still looks like wood.

It'll have rings, it'll have bark, but as soon as you touch it, as Aarti described, it feels like a rock.

Amazing.

Okay, so what about the Wooly Wonder, Ilaria?

What have we figured out there?

Well, you said it was hair and that it was 20,000 years old, so it must be an ancient mammal.

Okay, so how could hair last 20,000 years?

We think it must have been frozen.

Oh, I like where you're going with this.

Pretty cool.

In fact, really cool.

Frozen.

Right.

So what kind of animal do you think this might be from Ekaansh what do you think?

You called it a wooly wonder.

So we thought that might be a clue that it was from a wooly mammoth.

You guys are spot on.

That's exactly right.

This hair is from a wooly mammoth and it was preserved in permafrost.

Very cool.

In fact, paleontologists have found fossils of entire animals that as far back as 100,000 years, they have found bison, wooly mammoths, ancient lions and horses.

Amazing.

So remember, when you're looking at fossils, you're looking at the history of our own earth, and we can even investigate how animals interacted with their environment.

Great job, crew.

So remember, my friends, stay curious and keep experimenting.

support for Curious Crew.

is provided by MSU Federal Credit Union, offering a variety of accounts for children and teens of all ages while teaching lifelong saving habits.

More information is available at MSUFCU.org also by the Consumers Energy Foundation, dedicated to ensuring Michigan residents have access to world class educational resources by investing in nonprofits committed to education and career readiness.

More information is available at consumersenergy.com/foundation and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

I love bloopers.

They make me laugh.

It's petrified.

Don't be petrified.

Yeah.

Back in time.

So Krishaan do you have any idea what animal is this is television at its finest.

Stay curious!

What?

Investigation three Take one.

That was perfection.

Modeling moments One Take one.

Good Job Julia.

Our last wrap.