Shape and polish real fossil stones from times long past. Learn about amber that came from prehistoric forests and coral
that existed in ancient seas, and make them into gems for your collection. Make and shape your own pieces of
simulated amber. Bury, then discover a true-to-life looking fossil.
Introduction
In this kit you will smooth and polish your own personal “time capsule” rocks. You will learn about the fascinating
histories of ancient amber and petrified coral. You’ll get to polish your creations to a bright shine, show and display
your true piece of jewelry to others. You even “cook up” your own pieces of simulated amber with an insect or
other object trapped inside.
You will also create an authentic-looking fossil rock by burying an ancient creature and then digging it out, just like an
amateur paleontologist.
What You Get
• 1 Uniquely-Shaped Piece of Amber
• 1 Rough Piece of Petrified Coral (Petoskey Stone)
• 2 Quarter Sheets of 220 grit Wet or Dry Sandpaper
• 2 Quarter Sheets of 400 grit Wet or Dry Sandpaper
• Denim Polishing Cloth
• Fossil Powder
• Mixing Tray and Stirring Spoon
• 1 Simulated Fossil Animal (to identify, bury and discover)
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• 3 Jr. Archeologist Tools (2 digging and marking sticks and 1 dusting brush)
• Magnifying Glass
• Plastic Ants
What Else You’ll Need
• A sanding/polishing work surface, such as a large piece of cardboard or a bread board
• White toothpaste (to use as a polishing agent for both stones)
• Newspaper or paper towels (to work over)
• A piece of aluminum foil
• A tiny bit of petroleum jelly or cooking oil spray
• A couple of delicate-looking plant leaves or interesting dead insects
Backgrounder
Your Ancient Amber is a lighter-weight, usually yellow or brown rock that at one time was resin from a tree in a
lush forest. Every so often, a piece of amber will contain trapped plants, dirt or insects.
Your Petrified Coral is a heavier, grey and white rock-like fossil with unique geometric patterns, formed by tiny coral
animals that once lived in shallow oceans.
Using this kit, you will turn two rough stones into both a polished gem and a display stone.
Wouldn’t it be great if your rocks could talk and tell you the story of where they came from? While you are working
with each piece, see if you can imagine a little about its true history.
Steps to Fun and Amazement
Creating Your Own Simulated Fossil
By comparing with the pictures under Fossil Snippets, determine whether the plastic animal in your kit is a simulated
Trilobite, an Ammonite, a Horseshoe Crab, or the skeleton of a Psittacosaurus.
Before you start, decide if you want to completely bury your animal to uncover later (which scientists call excavation),
or partially bury it to make a surface impression (called a trace fossil).
You may even want to use the internet to find pictures or drawings that show the shapes and patterns of small sea
shells, snails, bones, feathers, ferns or leaves to carve into your fossil rock (see step 6).
2. Holding your amber gently in one hand, wet a piece of the (rougher) 220 grit wet or dry sandpaper and sand one side,
until it is a shape you like. It works best when you take your time AND keep the sandpaper and amber wet and
cool -- rinse both frequently.
3. Don’t use power equipment to sand or polish, because amber can sometimes be fragile and will break if
treated roughly.
4. Smoothing any depressions or surface grooves may take a little more work. If you are going to make your amber
into a piece of jewelry, take the time now to sand it into a pleasing shape.
5. Repeat the hand sanding process with the (smoother) 400 grit sandpaper to remove any tiny scratches left from the
first sanding. Look for small, remaining scratches with your magnifying glass and keep sanding until they are gone.
1. Pour the fossil rock powder into the container.
2. Add about 2 tablespoons of water (25-30 cc).
3. Using the enclosed spoon, stir COMPLETELY until the entire mixture is moist, has a uniform color, and is the
consistency of yogurt. But DON’T STIR FOR TOO LONG, or it will begin to harden.
4. Then, either push your animal down into the mixture until it’s completely covered (you may have to use your finger
to scoop some of the mixture on top) … or push it about half way down into the surface, far enough to leave a deep
impression. If you buried it, try to memorize where it is located for digging out later.
5. Wait for the block to harden … approximately 2 hours. Flip the container over and push your fossil block out.
6. At this point, you can use your digger tools to carve and sculpt other fossil-like patterns into your fossil rock to make
it look even more interesting and realistic. You may choose to add your initials and the date as well. Let it AIR DRY until
the next day (be patient).
Don’t hurry this step.
6. The final step is polishing. Place a small amount of white toothpaste on the denim polishing cloth and rub repeatedly,
rinsing the stone with water from time-to-time, until your nearly clear amber has a warm shine.
It is now your personal gem!4. Smoothing any depressions or surface grooves may take a little more work. If you are
going to make your amber into a piece of jewelry, take the time now to sand it into a pleasing shape.
5. Repeat the hand sanding process with the (smoother) 400 grit sandpaper to remove any tiny scratches left from the
first sanding. Look for small, remaining scratches with your magnifying glass and keep sanding until they are gone.
Don’t hurry this step.
6. The final step is polishing. Place a small amount of white toothpaste on the denim polishing cloth and rub repeatedly,
rinsing the stone with water from time-to-time, until your nearly clear amber has a warm shine.
It is now your personal gem!
7. Spread out a newspaper before you go to work. Excavating your fossil will be a little messy.
Making Your Own Simulated Amber
8. Now – just like a real paleontologist – carefully use the digger tools to locate and dig your animal out
In this activity, you will be making your own simulated amber pieces from ordinary pancake syrup,
(if it is totally buried) … or carefully pop the animal out of the top of the block (if it is partly buried). Use your brush
adding a plastic insect or even a piece of a feather or fern to make them look and feel like the real thing.
tool to sweep away loose material and expose a clean view of the impressions or remains of your “ancient” animal.
YOU WILL WANT TO ASK AN ADULT TO DO THE HEATING, STIRRING AND POURING OF THE HOT SYRUP.
If you buried your animal, you may choose either to completely remove it, or just partially expose it. Stop when you
like how it looks.
9. Remember to clean up and wash your hands after each step.
[optional]
If your kit contains a Psittacosaurus skeleton, you could pour all of the mixture into the palm of your hand, along with
your skeleton, and roll it into an oblong egg shape. After it dries overnight, use the digger tool to reveal just part of your
miniature dinosaur, still in its dino egg!
Polishing Ancient Amber
1. Examine your rough amber stone. Look to see if there are any bubbles of trapped ancient air. Your magnifying glass
1. Put about a square-foot piece of aluminum foil on your kitchen counter or a wooden cutting board and coat several
2X2” areas with a VERY THIN layer of petroleum jelly or cooking oil spray. These areas are where you will be placing
blobs of hot, thickened syrup.
2. Place a few of your plastic insects, upside down, in the middle of some of these spots. You may also want to include
a piece of a fern or other tiny leaf.
3. Heat about _ cup of regular pancake syrup* over medium heat in a small saucepan (a non-stick pan works best).
Bring it to boiling, until the bubbles are rising to cover the surface.
4. Continue boiling while CONSTANTLY STIRRING with a wooden spoon for about 3 minutes,** allowing the mixture
thicken, until it resembles foaming cola. Turn off the heat.
5. Have an adult pour the hot mixture onto the prepared spots, making dollops about 1 to 1 _ inches across, with
will help here. You probably won’t find an insect in the amber in your kit, but you might find some insect parts or debris
varying shapes and thicknesses. Some will contain insects or plant material, some will not. A wooden rod
from an olden forest, making your amber even more interesting. As you sand and polish it, it will become clearer
(like a chopstick) may help them more precisely place each dollop. CAUTION, use oven gloves, as the hot pan
and clearer.
and especially the hot syrup mixture can cause burns.
6. Allow your pieces of simulated amber to cool – about 20 minutes. Once hardened, you can easily pick them up
off the foil and hold them up to the light to see the entrapped surprise. Like a real fossil hunter, look at the insect or
plant details with your magnifying glass.
7. Your amber pieces will not last forever, and can become sticky in moist or humid air – just like each piece of real
amber once started out as a sticky blob, before the elements of nature and time turned it into a hardened gem.
Leave your best ones out to show friends, or store them in a plastic bag. Even though it may smell good, DO NOT EAT
Ammonites
Most Ammonites started their lives in the shallow waters of ancient seas as
tiny, soft creatures about 1mm in diameter – but then quickly grew a strong
outer shell to protect their soft interior. The spiral shape of their shells is very
pleasing to the eyes. When ammonites were living, their shells often had a
mother-of-pearl coating, occasionally preserved today in a few of the more
beautiful fossils. Most grew to be a few inches across, but there are a few
your simulated amber.
giant fossils as big as three or four feet!
* Light syrup contains more water, so you will have to boil longer. For the adults who are cooks … Like making candy,
Ammonites are named for Ammon, an ancient Egyptian god who was depicted
you are cooking the syrup to the hard-ball stage.
as having two spiral-shaped ram's horns, one behind each ear. From the time of
** if you boil the mixture for too short a time, it won’t set up; too long and it will become too hard to pour easily and
their appearance around 240 million years ago, to their extinction with the
too dark to see through.
dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, ammonites have left their shell remains
across the globe.
Polishing Petrified Coral
1. Examine your rough coral stone. Wet it and examine it with your naked eye, and then closely with a magnifying glass.
The wet viewing brings out the geometric details. See if you can identify the orientation of the ancient coral skeletons,
each of which was a single living coral years and years ago. Each living coral animal left behind an external skeleton
column in the shape of a stretched-out hexagon – a lot like the size and contour of a new lead pencil.
They belong to a group of predators called cephalopods, which today includes their living relatives, the octopus, squid,
cuttlefish and nautilus. Ammonites moved by jet propulsion, expelling water through a funnel-like opening to propel
themselves in the opposite direction. Today, the similar-looking nautilus can swim with jet power and also change its
depth, using a tube that connects to other chambers in the shell that can add or remove gas to control buoyancy.
Ammonites probably ate fish, crustaceans and other small creatures. Their soft body and extending tentacles lived only
in the biggest segment of the shell, at the end of the coil.
2. Whether you choose to polish the entire rock or only one side, this inspection will help you decide which surface is the
most interesting. Luckily, your rough stone has already been partially rounded and smoothed by the waves of ancient
Psittocosaurus
shorelines!
Psittacosaurus (pronounced sit-tako-sore-us) was a small, primitive dinosaur that
3. With the heavier and more durable petrified coral, you will want hold the stone in one hand and rub it on a piece of
sandpaper that lies flat on your work surface. Wet a piece of your roughest wet or dry sandpaper (220 grit) and sand
one side at a time until the surface of the rock is smooth and some of the coral skeleton features are more visible.
lived long before the big dinosaurs we love to learn about – around 100 million
years ago. Psittacosaurus means "parrot lizard." It was an herbivore, eating
plants with its tough, narrow, hook-like beak. It only had teeth in the cheeks
near the back of its mouth.
It works best when you keep the sandpaper and stone wet, and rinse frequently.
When fully grown, a Psittacosaurus could walk on two or four legs and might
4. Smoothing out any roughness, depressions or grooves still in your stone will take a little extra work, so be patient.
stand about 4 feet tall and weigh 90 pounds. Its arms were a lot shorter than its
If you plan on displaying your ancient coral, now is the time to sand the surface even and smooth. More time spent
legs, so we’re pretty sure it could both graze slowly at ground level, or run very
here will give you a nicer finished piece later.
fast when it needed. This was the smallest of all known dinosaurs – about the
5. Repeat the hand sanding process with the smoothest sandpaper (400 grit) to remove any tiny scratches left from the
rough sanding. At this point you will probably want to hold the coral rock in one hand and sand with the other.
6. To polish, first carefully wash and dry your stone to remove any remaining sludge. Then place a small amount of white
toothpaste on your denim polishing cloth, and rub repeatedly in a circular motion. Rinse the stone often, until the
surface is smooth and shiny, like it was waxed.
size of a large dog!
Infants about to hatch from their eggs were really tiny. The eggs were oblong, about 3-5 inches long and an inch across,
and several were laid in a circle to form a nest that was attended by the parents.
Trilobites
Trilobites are one of the oldest and most common fossils. They thrived between
500 and 250 million years ago. There are thousands of species of trilobites,
The Science and History Behind the Fun
but all have a central lobe and two outer lobes in common, hence the name
Fossil Snippets
so you can easily hold and examine an entire fossil animal and turn it over
Your kit will contain ONE of these four possible fossils. Use the drawings and descriptions below to decide just which
timeless animal you have!
TRI-lobite, which means three lobes. Most are about 2 or 3 inches long –
in your hand.
Trilobites lived in marine waters. Some trilobites could swim, while others burrowed or crawled around on muddy
sea floors. They were the first group of organisms in the animal kingdom to develop compound eyes and multiple
appendages (legs) for moving around.
All Trilobites were covered with an exoskeleton – a skeleton on the outside – that they would shed as they grew, then
develop a new one (called molting). Their exoskeletons had many segments, so they could roll into a ball for safety.
Some were also covered with spines and bumps for added protection.
Horseshoe Crab
Horseshoe Crabs are called “living fossils,” because their ancestors not only left
fossils on the earth for hundreds of millions of years, but are still found today in
coastal waters off India, Japan, Indonesia and the east coast of the United States
Rubbing amber with a cloth will make it electric, attracting bits of paper. The Greek name for amber
is elektron, the origin of our word electricity.
Amber is one of the few materials considered a gem that is not a mineral (pearls and ivory are some others). it is actually
an organic substance (containing molecules from living materials).
Soon after amber was discovered by men and women, it became valued as a gemstone because it seemed to capture the
color of the sun and was easily polished to a warm luster. Amber was called “Gold of the North” at the height of the
Roman Empire. It was carved to make bracelets, necklaces, beads and earrings or other types of ornamentation.
Some cultures even thought amber had special health and healing powers.
An example of amber with a mosquito inclusion is found in the famous movie, “Jurassic Park.”
and Mexico. That’s why we know so much about what they were really like in the
Here’s an interesting story: when Columbus arrived at Hispaniola (the Island that is now the Dominican Republic
past. They were around way before the first dinosaur roamed the earth, and have
and Haiti) in the 1490s, he traded gifts with a young Taino prince. He gave the prince a strand of Baltic amber beads
survived the catastrophic events that wiped out the dinosaurs, as well as super
in exchange for a pair of shoes decorated with Caribbean amber!
warm and salty oceans, and ice ages -- with little problem.
These totally harmless, prehistoric-looking sea creatures have been quietly scampering around shorelines pretty much
unchanged for all those years. They are detritovores, which means that they sift through sediments for food. They
can go a full year without eating!
Actually, Horseshoe Crabs aren’t really crabs. They are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than true crabs!
They have a hard, curved shell that protects their soft bodies. Their long, spiky tail is not poisonous, and is used mostly
to flip itself over when it’s washed upside down by waves.
Petrified Coral
The Petrified Coral in your kit is also called a Petoskey Stone (Pet-Oss-Key), and is named after an area in Michigan
where many are found. Petoskey Stones are actually fossilized colonies of corals that once lived in a warm,
shallow ocean.
The soft, living tissues of the tiny coral animals have long since died, but each one left behind its own limestone
skeleton, several of which you can see in your stone. The surface of some corals looks a lot like a honeycomb.
Here’s another neat fact: Horseshoe Crab blood is bright blue. A substance in their blood called LAL is used to test
New corals then built on top of the old ones to form huge coral rocks and reefs. Later, over time, the limey skeletons
for bacteria in human blood, vaccines, and ALL medical drugs made in the United States and other countries. It turns
were replaced by calcite or silica in a cell-by-cell hardening process called petrifaction.
out that thousands of horseshoe crabs “donate” their blood every year, then are released to go on living normal lives
and making more blue blood. Horseshoe crab blood is worth an about $15,000 a quart!
When the oceans gradually disappeared, these coral reef fragments and stones were left behind. When the glaciers
that formed the Great Lakes of the United States scraped the bedrock surface they pushed, rolled and carried the
stones until they were deposited where many are found today.
Amber
Amber was formed from resin in trees that lived a long time ago. When this sap-like material seeped or dripped out of
The ancient coral that formed these stones is officially called Hexagonaria percarinata. Notice how the name starts
with “hexagon,” the most common geometric shape seen in your stone.
the tree trunks and branches, it would fall to the forest floor. Sometimes, bugs attracted to the aromatic, gooey resin
would land on it, get stuck and die, to be forever trapped inside as “insect mummies.”
In the first years after dripping from its tree home, the resin would still be soft and gummy. Only after the passage of
Outside the Box Activities
a lot of time and some earth-changing geologic events would it harden. As it aged, most amber was actually covered
Polishing options: for an even smoother surface, you could follow the 400 grit sanding step (either stone) with a piece
by an ocean and later buried deep under huge mountain ranges by earthquakes. It took these extreme pressures,
of extra-fine 600 or higher grit wet or dry sandpaper. Instead of denim, you could also use corduroy or suede as a
temperatures and a long, long time to turn a blob of sticky resin into the hard, clear gemstone you hold in your hand.
polishing cloth. You might also choose to use leather and a commercial polishing compound to give your stones a very
To transform from gummy to hard, Amber had to go through a process called polymerization (small molecules link
highly polished surface.
together to become much larger molecules), then amberization, the hardening process that took place under the great
You might consider making a necklace out of your polished amber. You could buy a special “double paddle” clip from
pressure and temperatures found under oceans and in rock and land formations.
a bead store and carefully superglue it to one end of your amber piece. Or, you could drill a small hole near one end on
Wow! Your amber gemstone is kind of a “time capsule” from one particular day … long, long ago.
slow speed -- meeting halfway from each side -- then gradually enlarge the hole. BE CAREFUL here, as drilling could
cause your stone to shatter.
Amber from the Baltic region in Northern Europe is officially called succinite, while the amber in this kit comes from
the Dominican Republic in North America and is called retinite. They are both highly valued and most often made
into jewelry.
Hang your gem from a light chain or leather string, and you will have a handmade necklace that carries around its own
good luck and ancient history.