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My 12-year-old nephew asked why we still dig up old bones if DNA tests exist, and I couldn't answer him
He hit me with that while we were looking at the dinosaur hall at the Field Museum in Chicago over the weekend, and I stood there for like 30 seconds with my mouth open. I finally said something about how bones show us how things moved and lived, not just what they were, and honestly it felt weak even to me. So now I have to ask, how would you have answered that one for a sharp kid?
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claire_grant3422h ago
Laughed at the 30 seconds with your mouth open part because I did the exact same thing when my daughter asked me this at the natural history museum last summer. I mumbled something about how you can't get DNA out of rock and she just stared at me like, okay but these are bones, not rocks. What finally clicked for me was telling her that bones are the actual animal, like the real thing that stood there and walked around, and a DNA test is more like a recipe than a cake, if that makes sense. You can have the recipe and still learn a ton by looking at how the cake actually came out. Also the digging itself is sort of the point, finding them in layers tells you who lived with who and what the world was like back then. Glad I'm not the only one getting taken down by a 12-year-old.
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