Dinosaur Dentistry (and Math)

Sometimes Anna asks us questions that we don’t know how to answer or need time to prepare the answer. So last week I introduced “A Question Box”. It’s nothing fancy – I cut the hole in the small box that was floating around and told Anna that we will be putting this kind of questions into the box, so we can investigate them “when we have time”. The very first question that went to the box was How big were T-Rex teeth?

We have visited Museum of Natural History in New York in the summer, but interestingly Anna had very vague memory of it. So we read My Visit to the Dinosaurs by Aliki (we own this book), and looked at the pictures from New York. Anna was very fascinated to see the pictures of herself touching dinosaur teeth and posing next to the skeletons of dinosaurs. That visit came back to her at least to some degree. Then we did online research by typing her question into Google and it came back with the answer – T-Rex teeth were up to 8 inches including root (some other sources say 9 inches). Anna measured 8 inches on paper and I helped her draw a line across. Then she drew teeth of that size and drew her own tooth for comparison. We then talked briefly about what “drawing true to  size” means in comparison to drawing to scale, because she keeps pointing out that continents cannot possibly as small as they appear on her globe. She cut her tooth and stuck it into her mouth to see if it was true to scale (it ended up to be too big). I also had an idea to see how many of her teeth fit into one T-Rex tooth, but at that point she was already off to another idea – starting a science journal. She took one of her notebooks and wrote a note in it T-Rex teeth 8 inches long (I provided her with spelling). She didn’t want to draw a picture – she said that her science journal will only have notes. I am excited that suddenly she is more interested in keeping a journal – all our previous attempts led nowhere.

I am linking this post to Science Sunday hosted by Adventures in Mommydom and Math Links hosted by Joyful Learner.