Y6 Natural History Museum Trip 2021

Published by Dolphin School on Tuesday 18th of January 2022

The Y6s had a wonderful day at London’s Natural History Museum. We spend the morning classifying out invertebrate arthropods into arachnids, crustaceans, myriapods and insects. It was challenging to work out which category some animals went into if they had overlapping features. The Pseudo scorpion was tricky! Once every invertebrate was in the correct place we looked into social insects and found out the intricate community structure of ants and bees – everyone has their very own specific role. We then moved onto the marine mammal section, specifically the cetaceans. These are marine mammals who spend their lives entirely in the water – coming up to breathe of course. They evolved from a wolf-like creature and so using fossil evidence we were ale to see how their features changed over time making them adapted to their current environments. We particularly enjoyed studying the colours of the cetaceans, their under bellies are lighter in colour so that they are also camouflaged with the sky from any lurking predators below. We took wonderful notes so that we can our Cetaceans Essay when we return to school. The afternoon was spend in the Earthquake section investigating the impact of different types of earthquakes and why some can be more devastating than others. After a little shake-up in the earthquake simulation zone we headed back to school.