News Story - Idaho State Journal

POCATELLO -- The children in the sandbox at the Pocatello Zoo were paleontologists. The sandbox was a quarry rife with the fossilized remains of the massive mammals that once roamed Idaho -- creatures such as Bison Latifrons and Harlan's ground sloth.

Three-year-old Emmalynn Packard brushed away red sand and revealed a black bone. The bone was a replica, cast from molds made using fossils from the Idaho Museum of Natural History, but the excitement the small, blond girl felt about her discovery couldn't have been more genuine.

"I found something! I found something!" Packard shouted, running toward her mother, who was watching her daughter work from a nearby bench. "I have to see what it is Mom. Come over here."

On Tuesday morning, the Pocatello Zoo unveiled a new attraction that's already proven to be a mammoth-sized hit with the local youths. Bark-covered tree trunks support the sun shelter over the sandbox, and a rustic wooden sign denotes it as the "allotta bones fossil dig site."

The fossils were made from a cement mixture poured into molds, and they were inset in concrete within the sandbox. A book with laminated pages and a wooden cover is fastened to a boulder beside the sandbox and depicts the animals featured inside, along with facts about the creatures from the past.

Riley Fitzpatrick, 5, found fossils from most every animal in the book.

"I found another one. I found four," Fitzpatrick said as he begun brushing away sand from a fifth specimen. "I'm a good finder. When I feel a rock, I dig for it."

The zoo also capitalized on the new sandbox during a fossil summer camp, sponsored by the local company Dig It. On the second day of the camp Tuesday, actual fossils of Knightia fish, which were 55 million years old and unearthed in Wyoming, were buried in the sandbox for the children to excavate. The young paleontologists brought the fossils they found to the zoo's tree house to prepare them with specialized tools of the trade. The summer camp continues through Thursday.

The sandbox was constructed with between $3,000 and $4,000 in zoo education funds, private donations and donated labor from local contractors.

This document was originally published online on Wednesday, August 06, 2008

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