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Ari Raider's Training Materials · Jurassic Attack · Training Center 3 of 6
Trace Fossils
The mud around the Sludge Pits is stamped with marks left by animals that died a hundred million years ago. Reading them right is the only way to find the buried drain.
What you're training for
At the Sludge Pits, black sludge is bubbling over the path and every mark in the mud is a clue. The drain reveals itself to whoever can match each trace to what the animal was doing. Train here first; prove it in the simulation.
The science
- A body fossil is part of the animal itself — bone, shell, tooth. A trace fossil is the evidence it left behind.
- Traces include footprints (it walked here), burrows (it dug a shelter), bite marks (something attacked), and coprolites — fossil dung, which reveals diet.
- Traces record behavior that bones can't: trackway spacing shows how fast a dinosaur moved, and parallel tracks suggest it traveled in groups.
- One animal leaves one skeleton but can leave thousands of traces — so traces often outnumber bones in the record.
Teach it today — one tub of playdough
The track-maker. Each group secretly presses a "behavior" into playdough — walking prints, a burrow, bite marks in a snack, overlapping tracks — and the next group has to reconstruct what happened and defend it with evidence. Detective first, answer second.
Trained and ready? Prove it at Stop 3 — the Sludge Pits. Free, no logins, progress saved on the device.
Enter the Realm at Stop 3Resources in this training center
Worksheets, reading passages, flashcards and printables for this lesson are being added — new resources land here first. Get one email a month when they do, or browse the whole free library.
The hands-on half: the Jurassic Attack Adventure Kit puts six real specimens — including a genuine coprolite — plus six Digs, six Gemlings and the Realm map in your students' hands. $19.99, or $15 a student for classrooms.
More Jurassic Attack training
Petrified Wood · Fossil Layers · Trace Fossils · Fossil Preservation · Dinosaur Teeth · Fossil Bone · Enter the Adventure →