Switch to the ✨ Magic tool and scan the cliff face — hover until a fossil appears, then click to identify it.
About Written in Stone
How do I explore?
Select the ✨ Magic tool from the panel, then move your magnifier slowly across the cliff face.
Click to identify the fossil — the card will reveal the animal that once lived here.
Once all four fossils are found, arrange the animals in order from oldest to youngest.
Tips
Use Help me Spot them in the panel if you need a hint about where to look.
Switch to 👆 Browse mode to revisit any fossil you've already found.
In the age activity, click I need help for a thinking prompt about how rock layers work.
Primary standard
3-LS4-1
Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived long ago.
Design intent
The backdrop is a real photograph of Badlands National Park — an active site of geological and paleontological research — grounding the activity in an authentic scientific context.
The fossil search is not strictly required to address the standard, but it gives students a small taste of real fieldwork: the patience of scanning, the uncertainty of not knowing where to look, and the reward of a find. That arc mirrors what scientists actually experience.
Help is woven in throughout — hint markers, a "Help me Spot them" button, and a thinking prompt in the arrange activity — so students who feel stuck have a path forward rather than a dead end.
Discussion prompts
It is illegal to remove fossils from Badlands National Park. Why are scientists just as interested in where a fossil is found as in the fossil itself?
We found Mesohippus (the ancient horse) to be more recent than the Oreodont. Does that mean the two animals never coexisted on Earth?
Based on our four discoveries, can we say with certainty when each of these animals first appeared — or when the last one died out?
All four animals we found fossils of seemed to thrive in wet, forested environments. Yet the Badlands today is arid and sparse. How were these animals able to survive in such a dry landscape?
Scientific terms / Focus vocabulary
Stratigraphy — the study of rock layers and their sequence
Fossil record — the collection of fossils and what they tell us about past life
Geological formation — a distinct, named layer of rock with shared characteristics
Relative age — the age of a rock or fossil compared to those around it (older vs. younger), without an exact date
Superposition — the principle that in undisturbed rock layers, deeper layers are older
Paleontology — the scientific study of prehistoric life through fossils