“How old is it?” is one of the first questions you’ll probably ask when you see an interesting rock or fossil. It’s certainly one of the first things that a geologist wants to know. As you’ll ...
Dinosaurs used to live in New Zealand. We know this because their fossils have been found in a few places. The fossils of a number of different dinosaurs were found at the Mangahouanga Stream, in ...
Go back in time 50 million years, and Earth looked incredibly different. Crocodiles lived near the North Pole, and the Antarctic coast looked more like our West Coast beech forest than the frozen ...
In this activity, students use different pieces of a jigsaw to work through a process of observation, discussion, collaboration and deduction to determine what the picture shows. The activity is ...
Plant reproduction is a topic that lends itself to many areas within the junior and middle school curriculum. This teacher resource provides a number of literacy and numeracy links to New Zealand ...
In this activity, students date fossils from one site by matching them to fossils already dated somewhere else. They use real data from Mangahouanga, made famous by paleontologist Joan Wiffen. By ...
By comparing some features of fossilised plants with the same features of plants living today, scientists hope to be able to learn more about the effect of changing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in ...
In this online PD session recorded on 15 October 2015, primary school teacher Kim MacPherson talks about the Science Learning Hub’s resources – Conserving native birds – and how she used a ...
Active reading is an important activity for making meaning during the process of science inquiry (Osborne, 2010). The integration of science and literacy can enhance student learning in both ...
In this recorded professional learning session join Nicola Daly, Associate Professor in Education, expert in children’s literature and developer of the picture book collections – ...
Joan Wiffen and colleagues were famous for finding fossils at Mangahouanga Stream, in north-west Hawke’s Bay. Dr James Crampton, paleontologist at GNS Science, outlines some of the marine ...
Dr James Crampton, paleontologist at GNS Science, explains how relative dating was used to determine that dinosaur and other fossils found in north-west Hawke’s Bay were from the Cretaceous ...
Professor Tim Naish and the multinational ANDRILL operation team drilled nearly 1,300 m below the Ross Ice Shelf. He explains how examining a sediment core is like pages in a history book ...
Choose the best methods for finding the absolute dates of different rock layers. You will need the Adobe Flash Player to view this.
Historical artefacts like moa bones can be dated using a technique that measures the activity of the radioisotope carbon-14 still present in the sample. By comparing this with a modern standard ...
This timeline lets you see aspects of Athol's life and work, and how these fit into a wider science picture of radiocarbon dating. A full transcript is underneath.
