Titanoboa: The Amazonian Monster, was one of my favorite projects solely based on the fact that it was over a giant snake. Titanoboa was a massive snake that measured at about 50 ft long and weighed over a ton. Related to the modern day Boa Constrictor, it lived in a similar environment- the dense, swampy, humid and hot jungles of the Amazon. It lived during the Paleocene era around 60 million years ago. It would hunt it's prey by ambushing it, then constricting the unfortunate prey to death- be it crocodiles or other ancient Cerrajon animals. It could then go up to a year without eating again. Fossils of the snake were uncovered while workers were mining for coal and uncovering layers of rock in the Cerrajon coal mine.
Marine Fossils was another one of my favorite projects, as I have had a fascination with fossils for awhile, specifically marine fossils. A fossil is any impression or remains of an organism that is preserved in rock or mineral. Fossils are identified by certain qualities- skeletal structure, characteristics, functions, etc. The first person to come up with idea of classification was Aristotle. Two common types of marine fossils were trilobites and sponges. Ichthyosaurus are another type of marine fossil, a lizard-fish like animal that hunted fish and squid during it's reign. It's fossils were found in Torres del Paine in Chile. Two organisms that exist today that are living relatives of marine fossils include salmon and dolphins, they have similar skeletal structures and teeth as their ancestors did.
The Middle Between Birds and Dinosaurs was another one of my favorite projects, most projects that had to do with dinosaurs or prehistoric life held my attention for some portion depending on how well it was done. There were three main similarities between birds and dinosaurs that helped scientists theorize this link between species- they had similar feet, laid eggs, and had hollow bones. In China, a fossil was found by a Belgium scientists that was of a dinosaur, as it had needle sharp teeth, but it had feathers. The dino-bird was named Archeapteryx and sparked a worldwide revolution in paleontology, that maybe dinosaurs and birds were one and the same, just evolved.
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