Lab Intro - Build your own dinosaur

Alright, welcome to our lab activity a build-your-own dinosaur. By now you already should have watched the How to Build A Dinosaur movie and I wanted to give you a little bit more insight into how things work in in the science that went into that. Let's say you're digging up dinosaur bones and you want to figure out what dinosaurs looked like based upon the bones. We start of course by peeling off all the layers of dirt that have accumulated over the millions of years since they died and you might see something like this. You don't get to dig a hole dinosaur skeleton out of the ground. You get a puzzle that looks more like this jumbled mess. Here's a map showing the location a different fossils in a particular quarry and if you're looking at this, you're saying, " gosh which type a bone is that? Well it kind of looks familiar..." Or, "where does this one here connect to?" To answer those questions, we can go look to evolution. Thanks To evolution, most vertebrates share the same basic bone structure. Here are we looking at the human arm which has a main bone called the humerus and two smaller bones that are and part of your forearm. And the elbow is where those two meet. And it turns out that if you look back at animals from frogs to lizards, birds, even bats and whales and cats, all the different vertebrates -- the things with spines -- seem to have the same basic structure. An upper arms that has one bone a forearm that has two bones and then five different fingers essentially. And so we can start using that fact to try and identify different bones. A humerus always has one attachment at the top for the shoulder and at the other end an attachment where there are going to be two smaller bones, and it also has some attachments for muscles there. So you can look for the evidence of those different attachment points to try and recognize which bone is which. Now here are two dinosaurs. This is a very large camarasaurus and the more traditional tyrannosaurus rex. What's cool about this is that, like the example we saw before, here's the humerus and here's the humerus in each of those that's that upper arm bone. They have the exact same number bones and same types of bones, but the sizes and shapes all differ. If you want to try to put together a dinosaur you just have to to recognize which bone is which and then put them in the right place. What makes dinosaurs different, of course, is... take a look at the size the skull and compare that to the size the back leg here on the top dinosaur versus the skull and back leg on the bottom dinosaur. Quite a difference! And that's because the way they stand, how big and heavy they are, what they eat -- all the different things that make these dinosaurs look different when we see them in Jurassic Park are because the underlying bones are different underneath. So you quickly sort those by shape into their type. This is what a paleontologist does . This particular picture is actually not a dinosaur -- it's a bear believe it or not. But you can recognize the shape a vertebra is different from our ribs, is different from the back legs, is different the front leg, is different from the pelvis. Now the challenge is of course to put them together in the right order. Knowing what you know about dinosaurs you could put this dinosaur together. You see the different parts of it and you kind of know where they should go. Let's take a look here. We will move the body over here. We will get the tail, and attach that. Oh, I think those are some legs We should put those on there. Those front arms, they should go there. And all of a sudden we have a dinosaur! Paleontologists that know more about dinosaur bones can put together more complicated dinosaur puzzles based upon individual little bones and even bone fragments, but it's the same idea of what we just did with this little animation here. For the lab assignment that you're going to do, you're going to be doing what they did in the video of how to build a dinosaur. You're going to start with the bones and you're going to end up by drawing the outline of what you think that dinosaur looks like. Now this picture here that I've drawn, t his grey outline, gets pretty low marks for artistic effort. Yours is going to be better! You're going to have a much fuller picture of what the dinosaur looks like based upon the bones underneath. You are also going to have a much more challenging collection of bones. And here are the bones you are using in this assignment. You'll notice that there are a lot of bones missing! We don't have a great idea what this dinosaur looks like, so how are you going to fill in the missing pieces? That's your challenge, so you'll download this map of bones from Moodle with the lab instructions as well. You'll next use the index images to figure out which bones go where and how to fill in the missing parts. And again, a copy of this index image is in the assignment PDF the instructions so you can read it more clearly. What we're going to do next is get practice for looking at bone structures and noticing differences and how that reflects differences in the way the dinosaur acts. We will look at these dinosaurs right here. So move on to the next slide in the VoiceThread and you're going to start making some comments and discussing these with your team.