♪♪♪ (Jessica Russell) Hi, everyone.

My name is Jessica.

Welcome to Vegas PBS STEAM Camp.

"STEAM" stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

And while it may sound like these are just subjects we learn in school, it's way more than that.

STEAM helps improve our lives and our community.

Today with the help of experts, we are going to learn about the STEAM that is all around us in Nevada, which you might have never noticed before.

Then I'm going to show you some fun activities you can do at home to learn more.

You can even send me pictures or videos of your results, but I'll provide details on that later.

Let's get started by investigating a question.

(ringing sound) It sounds like I'm getting my first video call of the day from my friend Ronaldo.

Hi, Ronaldo.

-Hi, Jessica.

-Do you have a question you've been wondering about that we can explore on today's show?

-My question is how do we know that dinosaurs lived in Nevada?

-Oh, that's a fantastic question.

Let's visit my friends Becky Hall and Dr. Josh Bonde.

They are paleontologists from the Nevada Science Center who can definitely help us answer this question.

♪♪♪ Welcome to central Nevada.

I'm paleontologist Josh Bonde with the Nevada Science Center.

♪♪♪ I'm paleontologist Becky Hall.

♪♪♪ Come along, we've got something to show you!

♪♪♪ Welcome to dinosaur country; 120 million years ago, this would have been flowing with rivers and lakes with dinosaurs roaming the shores.

♪♪♪ Often we get asked, how do we find dinosaur fossils in these vast open hills?

We have to use our eyes and look at the rocks on the ground for textures and patterns.

Let's take a look.

Let's see if you can spot some of these patterns and fossils in the ground here.

So take a look around me and see if you can see any of these patterns or textures in the rocks.

Do you see these three rocks right here and the texture in them?

What does that mean?

It means it has patterns in it.

Maybe like at dinnertime, you had a bone or your dog had a bone, you can see the patterns inside the fossil.

It also has a different color than the surrounding rocks.

It has more of a purple/blue tint than the tan and brown rocks around the area.

These are dinosaur bones!

♪♪♪ Let's go see what Josh is working on and see how a little fossil like this can turn into a big excavation site.

-We're at a site that was discovered about three years ago by piecing together little fossils like Becky just showed us.

We were able to piece those together.

We followed the bones up the hill, and we started digging.

So over the last three years, we've excavated what you see in front of you.

It's really slow-going work, so we have to use our tools and we go inch by inch.

As you can tell by the weather around us, our window for working on these fossils up here is not very large every year.

So we come up, we excavate a little more, and you can see there's kind of a blob of bone here.

There are some bones coming this way and this way, and we've been able to recover a couple of them and bring them back to the Nevada Science Center to clean up.

So you can see here it's got the nice bone texture and it cleans up nice.

We're not sure exactly what type of dinosaur this is, but based upon the textures, we know it's some type of dinosaur.

It's going in this direction and this direction is still in the ground, so we have a lot of work ahead of us.

We have at least a couple more years of digging here before it can definitively tell us what type of dinosaur this is.

Let's take a look at some of the tools that we use as paleontologists to dig up dinosaurs.

So the paint brush gently removes sediment from around the bones.

So without abrading the bones or scratching the bones, it just gently brushes off the dirt.

This might look familiar from your last dentist visit.

What we use the dentist pick for is just like the dentist does, scratching off hard minerals from the surface of bones.

An awl, you could find this tool at a hardware store.

We use it scratch away the dirt and the sediment to get down to the dinosaur bones.

The trowel is just like you would find in a garden store, and just like in a garden, we dig the dirt around and away from the dinosaur bones.

Come with us back to our lab in Henderson, Nevada so we can show you other cool fossils from around the state of Nevada.

-Let's go!

♪♪♪ Welcome to the Nevada Science Center's lab.

This is where we bring our fossils after we discover them in the field so we can clean them up or prepare them for either research or display for you to come visit.

So let's talk about how a fossil becomes a fossil.

It can take thousands to millions of years for the process to occur.

Here is a modern bone that I found out doing field work.

You can tell that it's modern by the way it looks and feels, but this is still an organic compound.

It takes thousands of years for it to become a fossil.

The first thing that has to happen is the animal has to die in the right sediment or dirt.

It has to be buried very quickly so the weather elements don't get to it or other scavengers.

Once it's buried, the Earth does its processes, and it replaces the organic material like bone into minerals.

So it becomes mineralized, making the fossil very hard and preserved for millions of years.

So in order to prepare or to clean up a fossil once we bring it back to the lab, we use special tools.

Some of the tools are similar to the ones that we used out at the excavation site, and some of them are different.

Let's look at my toolbox to see the tools that I've come up with that help me prepare the fossils, things like toothbrushes, dental picks, paint brushes, a boogie bulb, chisels and tweezers.

My last tool is called an air scribe.

Not all fossils are very fragile, and some of the rock they're in is very hard.

For those I need to use a mechanical tool like the air scribe.

The air scribe uses air compression to make the tip vibrate which helps me chisel out the bone from the rock.

Some discoveries turn out to be something new.

We've been studying some dinosaur bones from the Valley of Fire State Park for the past 15 years, and it turns out to be a brand-new species of dinosaur, the first named dinosaur to Nevada, Nevadadromeus Schmitti.

After years of finding bits and pieces of the dinosaur, we were able to piece them together to identify different elements to then name the species.

Here's a femur, some toe bone, and some backbones.

Thanks for joining us at the Nevada Science Center.

You too can come visit our lab to see our most recent research projects.

♪♪♪ I love being a paleontologist.

I get to go explore, be outside, find new discoveries and get to teach people about science.

I encourage you if you want to be a paleontologist to follow your dreams, or whatever that may be.

If you want to be a paleontologist, my best suggestion for you is right now start reading as much as you can.

Be curious and read.

In school, the most important subjects I think for paleontology is geology, the study of rocks, and biology, the study of life, because we study life preserved in rocks in the fossil record.

Thanks, Becky and Josh.

Today we learned that paleontologists have discovered dinosaur fossils in Nevada.

In order for dinosaur bones to become fossils, they have to be buried in the right sediment or dirt.

The minerals from the earth replace the organic or living materials found in the bones during a very slow process called mineralization.

Paleontologists identify fossils by looking for textures or patterns.

When they find fossils they excavate them, or dig them up, using many common tools you might have around your home or find in a hardware store.

Thanks, Becky and Josh.

It was so cool to visit an actual dinosaur excavation site right here in Nevada.

Now it's our turn to think like scientists to learn more about how fossils form.

Becky said fossils form when minerals replace the organic or living material in the bone.

That makes me wonder, how do minerals enter and travel through the bones in the first place?

We don't have a million years to do this investigation, so we are going to do a simulation instead.

A simulation is kind of like pretending.

It's a way scientists can see something happening without doing the real thing.

I call this the "mineralization simulation."

To get started, you will need a data collection chart, a couple of pieces of celery, one with leaves and one without.

You will also need a glass filled with water and some food coloring.

First, ask an adult to trim the bottom ends off the celery stalks.

Take a close look at the ends.

What do you notice?

Next, add a few drops of food coloring to the glass of water.

Then add your celery with the cut stalks down and do a little swirl.

Then make a prediction.

Draw what you think the celery will look like in two days.

Then observe your celery after four hours.

How has it changed?

Draw a picture or take a photograph.

Repeat the process after eight hours and again after 24 hours.

Then after two days, remove your celery from the water.

Break off the bottom and peel it back.

What do you notice?

Analyze all the data you collected and draw conclusions.

How did the food coloring travel through the stalks, and how did this investigation simulate the mineralization process?

Now let's check in with Scarlette who is doing this activity at home right now.

-Hi, Jessica.

Right here in front of me, I have two celery stalks and some red food coloring.

I decided to do this experiment to see where the red food coloring would go, if it will just rise from the bottom or if it will go all throughout the celery first.

Celery has lots of little veins that go up and down it, and that's how the water gets to the plant when it's still alive.

These two celery stalks have been sitting in this food dye for about two hours and 30 minutes.

Two things that I noticed are number one, the red food dye is getting carried up into the celery veins, and I can see that the veins are turning red.

And number two, because of the veins turning red and the red food dye going up into it, I can see that the edges of the leaves are turning red as well.

This red food dye is sort of like the minerals because we have the dead celery here that's good for eating, and it kind of sucks up into the celery and takes it over.

-Thanks for sharing your investigation.

You did an excellent job observing and noticing.

An important part of being a scientist is sharing your work with others.

Visit our website at vegaspbs.org/steamcamp to submit videos or pictures of your investigation to us at Vegas PBS with your grown-up's permission, or ask your grown-up to share it with us on social media by tagging @vegaspbs.

We will post some of your investigations on our website, and if yours is selected, we will mail you this awesome PBS Kids bag and a new book.

When you visit our website, you can also download the chart we use to keep track of our data and explore links to PBS Kids shows and activities to learn more about dinosaurs, fossils and paleontology.

Now let's visit Mr. Joey who will share an awesome book you could find at the library and an original song he created about dinosaurs.

♪♪♪ My name is Mr. Joey, and I work at Spring Valley Library.

Earlier you learned a little bit about paleontology from the Nevada Science Center, and you can learn a lot more about dinosaurs at the library.

We have books like this one, Everything Dinosaurs, published by National Geographic Kids, in which you can learn about fossil hunting and which animals were carnivores and which were herbivores, and differences between different time periods like the Jurassic and the Cretaceous.

I prepared a song about dinosaurs that I'm going to play for you.

♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ I used to walk the Earth ♪ ♪ but I don't do that anymore.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ All the carnivores eat the meat ♪ ♪ and stomp their feet, and stomp their feet.

♪ ♪ All the carnivores eat the meat ♪ ♪ and stomp their feet, and stomp their feet.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ I used to walk the Earth ♪ ♪ but I don't do that anymore.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ All the herbivores eat the plants, ♪ ♪ and they dance, and they dance.

♪ ♪ All the herbivores eat the plants, ♪ ♪ And they dance, and they dance.

♪ ♪ Oh, clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur.

♪ ♪ I used to walk the Earth ♪ ♪ but now among the stars I soar.

♪ ♪ Clap clap roar, I'm a dinosaur!

♪ ♪♪♪ Welcome back to the Vegas PBS STEAM Camp science lab.

We still have time left, so let's investigate another question.

(ringing sound) Oh, wonderful.

Ronaldo is calling again.

Hi, Ronaldo.

-Hi, Jessica.

-What's your second question for today's show?

-My question today is how do rocks help us learn about the past?

-Oh, interesting one.

Let's ask Dr. Bonde who is standing by in Red Rock Canyon.

-Hi, Dr. Josh Bonde with the Nevada Science Center here.

Good to see you again.

I understand some of you are curious about rocks and minerals.

So minerals are actually the building blocks of our planet, and being the building blocks of the planet, they're also the building blocks of rocks.

So minerals are solids.

They're non-organic, and they have a very specific chemical composition.

We can have sedimentary rocks, which are rocks that are made out of pieces of other rocks; metamorphic rocks, which are rocks that have been baked and squished, or igneous rocks, which are rocks that have been erupted out of a volcano.

So we're out here at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

The namesake is from the red rocks in the canyons behind me, and these are all the fossilized remains of ancient sand dunes which migrated across Southern Nevada 180 million years ago as part of the largest desert in the history of Earth that we have a geologic record of.

So we're going to talk about the red rocks.

These are sedimentary rocks because they're made out of bits and pieces of previously existing rocks.

So let's go take a look.

♪♪♪ The rock I have here in my hand is actually a sedimentary rock, and the particular type of rock it is is called a sandstone.

If you look at the banding here, there's kind of an orange layer and there's a red layer.

So just like the cliffs behind me where you can see the orange and the red, what we're actually looking at is how ancient water and ancient fluids have interacted with this rock through time.

So over the hundreds of millions of years this was in the subsurface before exposed, the water table is interacting with it, and rocks can only rust if they're exposed to air.

Below this is where water would have been, and above this where it's rusty is above the water.

So if you're out at Valley of Fire or if you're here in Red Rock and you see the different color bands in the rocks, you're actually looking at where ancient fluids interacted with those when they were in the subsurface.

So the difference between this layer and this layer is just a miniscule amount of iron, so it doesn't take a whole lot to change the color of the rock.

So now that we've checked out 180 million-year-old sand dunes, let's head up to Mount Charleston, another geologic iconic spot in Southern Nevada, and see what's going on up there.

♪♪♪ All right.

We're up here on Mount Charleston now, so we're up above Red Rock Canyon where we just were.

The rocks around us now are quite a bit different, so we're not talking about sandstones anymore but we're still talking about sedimentary rocks.

The grey rocks around my feet are limestones.

Those grey rocks are the remains of microscopic shells of algae and big shells of things like brachiopods, clams, snails and even corals.

So this is an area that was a shallow tropical reef from about 500 million years ago to about 250 million years ago.

Most of Nevada was covered in this big tropical shallow seaway.

Let's take a closer look at one of these pieces of limestone and see what's in it.

I see a nice piece over here.

Let's take a look.

♪♪♪ So this is a piece of limestone.

What I'm looking at here, it has a bunch of fossils in it of marine organisms or marine animals.

So the gray is the rock, and then the little white blobs are the fossils.

What I'm seeing in here is a fossil called a crinoid.

The common name for crinoids are sea lilies.

They're distant cousins of sea stars except they grow on stalks, and then when the animal dies, all the little segments in the stalk fall apart, so I'm seeing a bunch of little segments of the stalk in here.

Another fossil I'm seeing in here is a horn coral.

So horn corals are an extinct type of coral.

It used to make reefs, except they didn't live in big colonies like modern corals do.

They lived in isolated little cones that look like horns, and that gives them their name.

One cool aspect about this gray rock, the limestone, is that it's made up out of the mineral called calcite, and calcite's chemical composition is calcium carbonate.

So if you put vinegar or any other type of acid on it, it releases that CO2.

So if you put that acid on it, it actually bubbles up and fizzes, which is kind of neat.

Let's head for Mount Charleston and these 300 million year-old limestones over to some 12 million year-old volcanic rocks of Black Mountain.

♪♪♪ Here we are at our final stop on the slopes of Black Mountain, which is just outside of Henderson.

During the Miocene, which is a period of time which ranges from about 23 million years ago to 5 million years ago, this area was volcanically active.

So all the slopes and all the rocks that compose Black Mountain are mostly volcanic.

♪♪♪ On the trail up, we found a couple of these different volcanic rocks.

What are some observations that you can make between the two?

♪♪♪ These two volcanic igneous rocks formed from different processes.

So the rhyolite formed as a result of a volcanic explosion, so as the ash was flying off the volcano, it was so hot that it actually welded itself together.

So if you look closely, you can actually see where chunks of the original volcano are all kind of welded together, versus the andesite, which is more from a lava flow.

An original volcano was actually over in Lake Mead off to our east, and just like a volcano in Hawaii where you see the lava flows making their way across the landscape, something similar would have happened here in Southern Nevada during the Miocene.

Thank you for exploring with me today.

I hope you have a better understanding of some of the stories that the mountains around Southern Nevada have to tell.

Every rock has a story.

Hope to see you out there on the trail.

♪♪♪ Thanks, Josh.

Let's review what we learned.

Rocks are made up of minerals, which are the building blocks of our planet.

Sedimentary rocks like sandstone and limestone are made up of pieces of other rocks.

The sandstone found in Red Rock Canyon was formed by ancient sand dunes.

The limestone on Mount Charleston contains the remains of shells from ancient sea life, which tells us Mount Charleston was once a shallow tropical reef.

Black Mountain in Henderson is made up of igneous rocks that erupted out of a volcano at Lake Mead.

Thanks, Dr. Bonde.

It's amazing how rocks can tell us so much about the history of Southern Nevada.

Now it's time for another investigation.

I noticed that the limestone on Mount Charleston is gray.

That makes me wonder, are all gray rocks limestone?

Dr. Bonde mentioned if you put limestone in vinegar, it will start bubbling and fizzling, so vinegar will be a key ingredient for this investigation.

You will also need three or four gray rocks from around your neighborhood or surrounding areas, a clear cup or glass for each rock and a data collection chart.

Before you get started, record where you found each rock on your chart and describe the properties of each rock.

What does it look like?

What does it feel like?

And what else do you notice about it?

Then make your predictions.

Which of your rocks are limestone, which aren't?

And why do you think that way?

Then it's time to investigate and collect data.

Place each rock in its own glass and cover it with vinegar.

♪♪♪ After five minutes, observe the rocks.

Are they bubbling a lot, a little, or not at all?

Write your results on your data collection chart.

Finish the investigation by analyzing your data and drawing conclusions.

Were your predictions correct?

And based on your results, can you conclude that all gray rocks are limestone?

What new questions do you have, and how will you investigate them?

Now let's check in with Ronaldo, who is doing this activity at home right now.

-Hi, Jessica.

I have three rocks.

I'm trying to figure out if any of them are limestone.

I think this rock is limestone because it has specks of white, and it also has a little orange which I'm pretty sure might do with something that might actually be inside of it.

I'm going to put all three rocks in the cups, and I'm going to put vinegar in the cups.

♪♪♪ I thought I saw bubbling on this one, but no more bubbles showed up so it's not limestone.

So I'm going to ask my dad if I can go to Mount Charleston to find some limestone.

-Thanks for sharing your investigation, Ronaldo.

Good luck finding some limestone on Mount Charleston.

And kids, I want you to share your results of your investigation with me.

Submit a picture or video through our website at vegaspbs.org/steamcamp with your grown-up's permission, or ask your grown-up to share it with us on social media by tagging @vegaspbs.

And remember if you're submitting a video, make sure we can see what you're doing and hear what you're saying, and try to keep your video to one minute or less.

We will select some projects for our website, and if we choose yours, you will get this cool PBS Kids bag and a new book.

When you visit our website, you'll also find links to PBS Kids shows and activities to learn more about rocks and minerals.

Now let's visit my friend Yvonne at the library.

She is going to share books you can check out to learn more about this topic.

♪♪♪ Hi.

My name is Yvonne Tran, and I'm from the Centennial Hills Library.

I hear that you're learning all about some really cool rocks, especially ones at Red Rock Canyon.

Here I have a book about the rocks at the Grand Canyon and how the rocks are formed there.

Did you know the rock layers of the Grand Canyon are almost two billion years old?

Wow!

That's really old.

And in this book, you'll see that the Grand Canyon is made up of sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks.

Here is another book that I enjoy.

This is a picture book about how a rock can be various types of things.

In this picture book, there are simple words and vivid imagery to show how rocks can be found everywhere and how they are a part of the Earth in food grinders and harbor protectors as well as even a sparkling ring, which is usually a mineral.

At the very end of the book if you want to learn just a little bit more about rocks, you can find all that information here.

There are many types of books like these here at the library district.

♪♪♪