Dino Dig: Dig Up a Dinosaur

Why Dinosaurs Are a Great Way In to Science

Very few topics light children up the way dinosaurs do. A five-year-old who cannot yet tie a shoelace will happily tell you that Stegosaurus had plates on its back and that Triceratops had three horns. That enthusiasm is worth using, because hiding inside every dinosaur question is real science: how we know about animals nobody has ever seen, how old the Earth is, why some animals ate plants and others ate meat, and how scientists measure, compare and sort the evidence they dig up. Dino Dig turns that curiosity into a short, hands-on routine that children can repeat as often as they like: dig carefully, rebuild, read the museum label and answer a few questions.

Everything in the game is based on how palaeontologists really work. Fossils are usually found in sedimentary rock, the kind made from layers of sand, mud and lime that settled over millions of years. Palaeontologists remove the heavy rock with big tools, then switch to small picks, dental tools and soft brushes as they get close to a bone, because fossil bone is fragile. Back in the museum, the bones are cleaned, studied and sometimes mounted as a skeleton, with metal rods holding them in the right places. The game follows the same steps, in a simplified way that young children can manage.

How to Play a Dig

1. Choose your level. The level sets the size of the dig, how many bone pieces there are and the questions at the end.
2. Break the rock with the pick. Tap a square of rock to break it. Deeper levels have some hard rock that needs two taps.
3. Switch to the brush. Under the rock is a layer of loose sand. If you see the tip of a bone peeking out, change to the brush and drag it back and forth over the square. Each sweep brushes some sand away until the fossil is uncovered. If you use the pick on a bone, it cracks and the dig loses a star, just as a careless swing would damage a real fossil.
4. Find every bone. The bar under the dig shows the bones found so far. Bonus fossils are hidden too, such as an ammonite shell, a shark tooth, insect in amber, a fern, a footprint or even fossil poo.
5. Rebuild the skeleton. In the museum, drag each bone onto the blue shape that matches it on the museum mount. If dragging is tricky, tap a bone and then tap where it goes. A bone only snaps in when it is close to the right place.
6. Meet your animal. When the last bone is in, the skeleton comes alive. Read the museum label, then answer three questions for your level.

What Your Child Learns at Each Level

The Science Behind the Game

• Fossils. A fossil is the remains or a trace of a living thing preserved in rock. Bones and teeth are body fossils. Footprints and fossil poo, called coprolites, are trace fossils, because they show what an animal did rather than what it was made of. Both kinds appear in the dig.
• Rock layers. Sedimentary rock forms in layers, with new layers settling on top of older ones. Unless the rock has been folded or tipped over, a deeper layer is older than the layer above it. Scientists call this the law of superposition, and the P3 to P6 questions use it.
• Deep time. The age of dinosaurs is split into three periods: the Triassic (about 252 to 201 million years ago), the Jurassic (about 201 to 145 million years ago) and the Cretaceous (about 145 to 66 million years ago). The museum label shows each animal on a timeline of all three. A favourite surprise: Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago and T. rex about 67 million years ago, so T. rex lived closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus.
• Classification. Not every prehistoric reptile was a dinosaur. Pteranodon was a pterosaur, a flying reptile, and Plesiosaurus was a sea reptile. On the other hand, birds are living dinosaurs, and Archaeopteryx is one of the earliest birds we know. Sorting animals into groups by their features is a big idea in science.
• Diet and food chains. Teeth and jaws tell us what an animal ate. Sharp, saw-edged teeth suggest meat; beaks and grinding teeth suggest plants. A food chain starts with plants, the producers, which make food using sunlight, then plant-eaters, then the meat-eaters that hunt them.
• Adaptations. A long neck for reaching high leaves, a tail club for defence, a sail, plates or a hollow crest: each feature probably helped the animal survive. For some features, such as the dome of Pachycephalosaurus, scientists are still not sure, and the game says so.
• Measuring. Lengths are given in metres and compared with things children know: a bus is about 12 metres long, a car about 4.5 metres, and a six-year-old about 1.2 metres tall. All sizes and dates are estimates, so they are written as about.

The Animals in the Museum

There are 18 animals to discover: Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Velociraptor, Ankylosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Spinosaurus, Diplodocus, Iguanodon, Pachycephalosaurus, Allosaurus, Gallimimus, Coelophysis, Plateosaurus, Archaeopteryx, and two animals that were not dinosaurs at all, Pteranodon and Plesiosaurus. Each museum label gives the name and how to say it, what the name means, when and where the animal lived, about how long it was, what it ate and two fun facts. The museum shelf fills up as your child rebuilds each one, and unknown animals show only as a dark shape, which makes a good reason to dig again.

Ideas for Home and the Classroom

• Measure it for real. After rebuilding a dinosaur, measure out its length in the corridor or the playground with a tape measure or by counting big steps. Ten metres is a lot longer than most children expect.
• A timeline on the wall. Make a long paper strip for the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, and add each animal from the museum shelf in the right place. Talk about how long ago 66 million years really is.
• Sorting sets. Print the colouring sheets and sort the animals: plant-eaters and meat-eaters, two legs and four legs, dinosaurs and not dinosaurs.
• A sandpit dig. Bury clean chicken bones or pasta shapes in a tray of sand, and dig them out with spoons and paintbrushes. Children quickly see why palaeontologists work so slowly.
• Be the museum guide. Ask your child to read the museum label aloud and explain the animal to the family, using the fun facts and the size comparison.

Printing a Fossil Worksheet

Press Print a fossil worksheet to print a sheet for the current animal at the chosen level. It has the museum label facts, a picture of the skeleton (with a ruler at P3 and P4, and a grid at P5 and P6), six questions with choices to circle and an answer page. Print a colour and label sheet gives a big outline of the animal to colour, and the skeleton with numbered boxes to label from a word bank, with the answers at the bottom. Only the sheet is printed, not the rest of the page.

Nothing to Install, Nothing Uploaded

Dino Dig runs entirely in your browser on any phone, tablet or computer, with no account and no download. It works with a finger on a touch screen or with a mouse. The museum shelf, stars and bonus fossils are kept only in your own browser, and nothing is sent anywhere. Saved dinosaur cards go straight to your own device.