Animals

http://a-z-animals.com/animals/ We discussed vertebrates and invertebrates today. Diego was able to give examples of invertebrates. He first thought of bugs, then sea life. He named squid and jellyfish. He brought up the fact that ants have their bones on the outside like armor. We learned about exoskeletons.

He wanted to look at wasps and talk about how aggressive they are. He was shocked to learn that wasps only live 12-22 days or so. He said, they don't even get old. He talked about that for awhile. There are 75,000 species of wasps and 12,000 species of ants. He wanted to look at termites and we learned they can live two years. We looked at the skull of a Dunkleosteus

from the Devonian Period. The skull is two feet long from 360 million years ago. He wanted to know how they found it when it should be at the bottom of the ocean.

He noticed that it looks similar to a snapping turtle. We talked about how land and oceans change over time. We talked about how the creek in Mt. Airy forest is full of sea life fossils and how that area was obviously under water at some point.


We looked at The Scale of the Universe. It led to an interesting discussion about size and what we can see with our eyes. We were introduced to units of measure that I have never heard of called yoctometers and femtometers. Diego's questions are always very astute. He asked, "How do people know this? If we can't see it, how do they know?"

We saw a Japanese Spider Crab that is longer than a human being so we had to verify that ourselves. We spent some time watching videos about Japanese Spider crabs on youtube. The crabs are fierce looking but have gentle dispositions. Diego said that he would hold one if I helped him. They can live 100 years. That led to ghost crabs and other sea creatures like the giant Oarfish.