When I think about dinosaurs, I usually picture the big ones. I think of triceratops with its pointy horns or apatosaurus with its long, long neck.
I asked my friend John Blong if those dinos ever lived with people. He’s an environmental archeologist at Washington State University. He studies early humans.
He told me that people and dinosaurs never lived at the same time. Well, mostly.
Dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid crashed to Earth. It threw up tons of dust and soot. It made Earth super cold and dark. It stayed that way for a long time. The world became a very hard place to live. Eventually, 75% of all living things died, including all the big dinosaurs.
People didn’t live on Earth at that time. The only mammals that lived back then were tiny. They looked like shrews or moles. It would take millions of years before mammals adapted enough to become primates. Scientists think the first humans showed up about 300,000 years ago. That was long after the dinosaurs died out.
It’s hard to imagine that one space rock wiped out the dinosaurs. But it did more than that. It killed 75% of the plants and animals on Earth. Me-OW.
I talked about that with my friend Barry Walker. He teaches geology classes about Earth’s history at Washington State University.
Walker told me that we call a space rock that hits Earth a meteorite. The meteorite that took out the dinosaurs set off changes on Earth. Those changes lasted for thousands of years. That’s how it killed so many things.
If you looked inside a T. rex mouth, you’d see some 12-inch teeth. That’s longer than my tail!
I asked my friend Aaron Blackwell if dinosaurs used those big chompers on humans. He’s an anthropologist who studies human biology at Washington State University. He told me dinosaurs and humans didn’t live at the same time.
“Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago—before there were even primates,” Blackwell said. “So, they could never have eaten a human or even a monkey.”
Before humans even had a word for dinosaur, they were digging up dinosaur bones. When one paleontologist dug up a big dinosaur leg bone, he wondered if it belonged to a giant human. A woman who dug up some large teeth wondered if they belonged to a huge iguana. Read More ...
In the movies, we often hear dinosaurs let out big, scary sounds. If you’ve ever played with toy dinosaurs, maybe you’ve also made your little Tyrannosaurus rex roar.
Yes. The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s been here for nearly 5 billion years. Only a tiny bit of it has escaped out into space. As far as we know, new water hasn’t formed either.
About 85-feet long (half a football field) and 65 tons (about 7 T-Rexes), the largest dinosaur scientists know about is Dreadnoughts. She was a plant-eater and with her 37-foot-long neck probably had no problem reaching the leaves at the top of trees.
I love a predictable schedule. Knowing when to eat, sleep and answer your questions keeps me chill.
That how the cells that make up our bodies work, too. They grow and die on a predictable schedule. Our bodies constantly make new cells to replace the ones that die. They grow for a set time and then die, too.
But sometimes cells grow out of control. They may grow faster or for a longer time than normal cells. They ignore the signals that tell a cell it’s time to die. They can even spread to other parts of the body and start growing there. That’s cancer.
When we think about orbits, we usually picture the Earth zooming around the sun. But does the sun just sit there? Or is it on its own journey?
I asked my friend Guy Worthey. He’s a space scientist at Washington State University.
He told me that an orbit happens because the gravity from something big pulls on a moving object. The sun has lots of gravity because it’s ginormous compared to Earth. So, that gravity pulls on the Earth and holds us in orbit.
But our sun isn’t the only star. It’s one of many, many stars in the Milky … » More …
If I drew a straight line through the Earth to the opposite side of the planet from me, I’d hit a place called Port-aux-Français. That’s an island near Antarctica. Mostly scientists live there.
Right now, it’s 12 PM, or noon, on Friday for me. But those scientists are probably snoozing in their beds. For them, it’s after 12 AM, or midnight, on Saturday. They’re already living in my tomorrow. Weird!
I talked about why that is with my friend David Luftig. He’s a science librarian at Washington State University. Science librarians are experts in two things: science and helping people find information for research and learning.
He told me it’s all because of Earth’s rotation. As the Earth rotates, or spins, the sun shines on one part of the Earth at a time.
If beetles seem to be everywhere, that’s because they are. Some beetles stand out because they’re colorful. Think about jewel beetles and ladybugs. Others play useful and weird roles in the ecosystem—like the poop-rolling dung beetle. Their ancestors probably even ate dinosaur poop.
Nobody knows exactly how many beetles there are, but scientists have some ideas. I talked about it with my friend Joel Gardner. He’s the collection manager for the insect museum at Washington State University.
When scientists find a new species, they describe what it looks like. They give it a name. They publish that information so other people know about it. That’s called describing a species. Scientists describe new insect species all the time.
Gardner told me scientists have described about 400,000 species of beetles so far. There are many more beetles we don’t know about yet. Altogether, there are probably between 1 million and 2 million beetle species.
It’s easy to love bees. They’re furry and buzzy. Along with other insects, birds and bats, they pollinate about one-third of the plants we eat.
I talked about how long bees have been buzzing around Earth with my friend Silas Bossert. He’s an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Entomology at Washington State University.
“The oldest bee fossil that is really without doubt a bee is between 65 and 70 million years old,” Bossert said.
When you think of the Jurassic Period, you might think of dinosaurs, but all kinds of insects, including praying mantises, roamed the Earth back then, too.
Some of the mantises died and fossilized into rock and amber, which helped to preserve them for hundreds of millions of years. As scientists uncover these fossils in modern times, they can learn more about the life histories of insects.
That’s what I found out from my friend Elizabeth Murray, an entomologist at Washington State University, who is very curious about the diversity of insects on our planet.
There are many kinds of creatures that lived on Earth long ago and their relatives still exist today. We know about them from fossil records, imprints or remains that we find in rock. Read More ...
Along with beaches, sunshine, and movie stars, a lot of people picture palm trees when they think of southern California. While there are lots of palm tree species in California, they aren’t all originally from the area. Many were brought from different places around the world.
Bird feathers are interesting. There are so many types, shapes, and colors. My friend Daniela Monk is a Washington State University professor who studies avian ecology, or the study of birds.
She told me about why the birds we know today have feathers and how they got them. Researchers believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs a very long time ago.
“One lineage of dinosaurs gave rise to birds,” Monk said.
Researchers around the world are finding dinosaur fossils that contain feathers. A fossil is the remains of a very old animal or plant that is preserved in a rock. From these fossils they … » More …
Of all the whales that live in the sea, the largest are blue whales. In fact, blue whales are the biggest known animals to have ever lived on our planet. Yep—even bigger than dinosaurs.
Microchips are smaller than your fingernail and packed with itty-bitty electronic parts. These parts are hundreds of times thinner than the hairs on your head, but sometimes you’ve got to think small to think big.
Scientists could see and feel electricity in nature long before they discovered how to make it. Maybe you’ve seen it during a powerful electrical storm or felt a little shock from static electricity.
It happens because of tiny parts of atoms. They’re called electrons and they are everywhere.
