04 Dec 2023
This term Year 7 have been learning about fossils in the most delicious way possible – with chocolate.
The class have been studying the rock cycle and sedimentary rocks. Sedimentary rocks, as the name suggests, are created from sediment which forms from weathering and erosion. The fine particles created from these processes reform into rocks over time.
Sedimentary rocks are important for paleontolgists as they are where fossils are found. It is this process of fossilisation that the students were trying to recreate in the lab.
The class used Bunsen burners and water baths to heat three separate types of chocolate. They then created a bedrock of dark chocolate where a hapless gummy bear was trapped. The students then entombed the poor candy in strata of milk chocolate and white chocolate, thereby fossilising it.
“An activity like this is a great way to demonstrate how a fossil is made,” explains Science teacher Brad Lemon, “Much better than working out of a textbook.”
“The class can see through this experiment that if our little gummi bear hadn’t been covered in layers of chocolate,” adds Mr Lemon, “Then scavengers (or students) would have eaten it up and it would have been lost to the ages.”
The class have since moved onto learning about space and the solar system. They’ll be studying aerodynamics and launching bottle rockets over the next week.
