Explore the world of rocks and fossils with hands-on fossil activities. Eyewitness Explorer: Rock and Fossil Hunter includes more than 30 fun activities you can do to learn more about rocks and fossils Learn how to study the rocks, minerals, and fossils around you -- from geodes of all shapes, to minerals that glow in the dark -- and unlock the secrets that rocks and fossils hold With Eyewitness Explorer: Rock and Fossil Hunter, you can start a rock collection, grow your own gems, and even create an erupting volcano Eyewitness Explorers encourage hands-on learning with 30 easy activities that help children observe, explore, and learn about the natural world. Each book explains the science behind the activities, laying the essential groundwork for contextualizing the experience to come. But at the heart of the books are the activities themselves -- a chance to learn by doing with experiments that can be carried out right at home. Simply choose one of the projects and follow the step-by-step, photographically illustrated instructions to build an erupting volcano, start a rock collection, or grow gems.

Become an explorer of the rock & fossil world. Discover the wonderful world of rocks and fossils with more than 30 easy-to-do fun activities, plus stunning pictures and amazing facts.

At a time when women were excluded from science, a young girl made a discovery that marked the birth of paleontology and continues to feed the debate about evolution to this day. Mary Anning was only twelve years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton--of an ichthyosaur--while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Mary's incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. The child of a poor family, Mary became a fossil hunter, inspiring the tongue-twister, "She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore." She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Once news of the fossils reached the halls of academia, it became impossible to ignore the truth. Mary's peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, laid out in his On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Mary's fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present. A story worthy of Dickens, The Fossil Hunter chronicles the life of this young girl, with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner, who became a world-renowned paleontologist. Dickens himself said of Mary: "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it." Here at last, Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning, of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked, is "probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology," to her deserved place in history.

Discover how to collect your own rocks from space. Learn all about the destructive power of ice. From making your own crystals to creating false fossils, this book is guaranteed to entertain all aspiring rock hounds.

Struan Reid explains how rocks, minerals and fossils are actually formed, what they can tell us about the past history of the Earth and its future, and where you can see and find them.

The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythology Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants—these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact—in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground. Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.

Become a rockstar with your own collection of gems, fossils, and rocks. Explore the incredible world of rocks with this amazing activity book for children. From creating your own volcano to growing gemstones at home, Rock and Fossil Hunter is filled with fun activities for curious young minds. With more than 30 projects, this book is ideal to keep children busy. Test the hardness of different rocks, make paint from minerals, discover the minerals in everyday objects around you and conduct acid tests on some of them, and even explore extraordinary minerals that glow under special lights. Each activity is accompanied by detailed step-by-step instructions that are easy to follow and a special symbol indicates which activities require adult supervision. Find out how fossils are made and learn how to not only spot them in nature but make fake fossil bones at home. Get building, testing, and learning with this fantastic book made for curious kids.