 Hi everyone! My name is Sumner and I'm a library assistant with the Long Beach Public Library. Today I'm going to show you how to create your own fossils. If you haven't signed up for summer reading yet, visit longbeach.beanstack.org to get started so you can earn prizes for all the reading that I know you're already doing this summer. If you are signed up, make sure to get credit for watching this video today by entering the code dinosaur into the activities tab. I think dinosaurs are super cool but they've all been dead for millions of years so most of what we know about them we learned from fossils. Fossils are the preserved remains or other evidence of plants and animals that once lived on earth. Most fossils are made of the hard parts of a living thing so their bones, claws, teeth or shells that become buried in the earth and over millions of years become rock. That's what happened to this ammonite here. Once upon a time it was a sea creature with little tentacles but the soft tissue of the tentacles was not preserved so all we have left is this shell that is now rock and it's pretty heavy. Other fossils are indirect evidence of living things so sometimes that is the impression of their skin texture or maybe a trail of footprints. Sometimes that's the outline of an entire plant or animal that gets pressed into some soft mud or it's the nest or burrow that an animal lived in. Paleontologists find and study fossils to learn about the animals and plants that lived in millions of years ago. Now we don't have millions of years to wait for our fossils so I'm going to teach you how to make a salt dough from just three ingredients and we will use a toy dinosaur. I have my little toy dinosaur here to create fossils of our own. The three ingredients that we're using for our salt dough today are flour, salt and water. In a medium-sized bowl you're going to take one cup of flour and one half cup of salt and you're going to mix these two together. I'm using my hands because I think it's more fun that way but if you want to use a spoon you can once it is evenly mixed together we're going to add half a cup of water but not all at once. I like to start with quarter cups so half of what you started with and if it is still too crumbly after that you can add more a little at a time. You probably won't use the entire half cup but it's nice to have it there so here you can see it's still pretty crumbly. I've got lots of loose flour so I'm going to go ahead and add some more water and just mix it all up and knead it together until it comes together into a uniform dough. There I need to add a little more water again, mush it all around in your bowl, all come together into a nice clump. We can turn it out onto the table and start making our bubbles. You want to pull off a decent-sized lump of dough, roll it to roll it around in your hands to make a ball and then smush it so that you have a disc. You don't want to smush it too thin because you need to have enough height to press your dinosaur toy in to make your fossil. Now I have my little baby Parasaurolophus and you can turn it on its side to take an impression of the whole animal, maybe rock it back and forth. I might have used a little too much water or you can make a trail of footprints. If you don't have a dinosaur toy you want to use you can do this with a leaf or a seashell or any other kind of toy you want. You can take a little bit of dough and make an impression of your own hands, make a fossil of yourself. If you want to make your dough extra special you can mix in some food coloring or glitter. If you want to get extra extra fancy you could even sculpt some bones or a little dinosaur nest. Be as creative as you want. After you're happy with your fossils they need to dry out so you can put your fossil onto a cooking sheet and with a grown-ups help bake them in a 200 degree oven for about two hours. If your dough is extra thick it might take longer than that. If you don't want to use the oven you can let your fossils air dry. Put them out in the sun and you have to be patient for this part because it'll take a few days for them to dry out completely. Once your fossils dry you can decorate it. Acrylic paints, watercolor paints or markers are all good choices. You can be as realistic or as creative as you like. You can show us your fossils by tagging the library on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Thanks for joining us!