Science for Kids — July 19: Rainforest surprises, sky-and-sea robots, and a dinosaur face-bite

Professor Pip adjusted his slightly crooked spectacles and patted the bulging pockets of his forest-green lab coat. Out came a small brass telescope, a pocket notebook labeled "Notes," and a folded photograph.

Mia, Leo, and their friend Asha were crouched beside him in a warm, sun-dappled clearing. Somewhere high above them, leaves rustled.

"Today," Pip whispered, "we are being forest spies. There's a monkey up there that scientists only just met!"

"Just met?" said Leo. "Didn't people already know all the monkeys?"

Pip's tail swished. "Curiouser and curiouser! That's the puzzle. Look at this." He held up the photograph. It showed a glossy black monkey with a bright orange patch around its mouth, like it had just eaten a very ripe mango.

"Whoaaa," said Asha. "Its lips look painted!"

"The local people call it Likweli," said Pip. "They've known it a long time. But scientists needed lots of proof to say, officially, 'this is a brand-new kind of animal.' So here's the game: How do you show something is truly new?"

He pulled a small speaker from his pocket. "First — listen." A low, froggy roar rumbled from the speaker. The kids gasped and giggled.

"That's this monkey's voice. No other monkey roars quite like that. Next — look closely." He passed the telescope. "Their skulls, their teeth, even the shape of their ears — all a little different."

"And then," Pip added, "the biggest clue of all. Scientists checked the tiny blueprint inside its body — its DNA. Every living thing carries a set of instructions. Likweli's instructions are so different from other monkeys' that they must have gone their own way about five million years ago."

"Oh!" said Mia. "Like when my cousin and I are family but we don't look the same because we grew up in different houses?"

"Exactly right!" Pip beamed. "This is what scientists call a new species — a group of living things that only really belong together. And it took an eighteen-year search, a blurry old photo, listening walks with local people, and a lab full of scientists to prove it."

Above them, leaves shivered. A pair of orange lips peeked over a branch — and vanished.

Pip smiled up at the canopy. "There are still creatures on Earth who don't know they have a name yet. What might YOU discover in your own backyard? Notebook out, spies. Let's start looking."

Professor Pip stood at the sunny edge of a little pond, patting his forest-green lab coat. Out came a paper airplane, a small plastic cup of water, and a tiny brass gear. His tail swished in triumph.

"Fellow scientists," he announced, "today we shall solve a very tricky puzzle. Can something be a great flyer AND a great swimmer?"

Mia, Leo, and their friend Theo sat cross-legged on the grass.

"Nooo way," said Theo. "Fish are shaped like fish. Birds are shaped like birds. You can't be both!"

"Ahh," said Pip. "Watch." He launched the paper airplane. It sliced through the air — WHOOSH! — before landing lightly on the grass. Then he pinched its little folded wings between his paws and dropped it into the cup of water. GLUB. It sank like a wet napkin.

"See? Big wide wings LOVE the air. Air is thin and light. But water is much heavier — pushing wings through water is like pushing a spoon through peanut butter!"

He pointed above the pond. Right then, a plump, penguin-like bird flapped past. PLOP! It folded its wings, tucked its head, and dove straight into the water.

"Behold — a puffin!" cheered Pip. "Puffins have solved the puzzle. In the sky, they beat their wings fast. Underwater, they use those same wings like little flippers to fly through the sea!"

Mia's eyes went round. "So they fly in the WATER?"

"Precisely!" said Pip. "And here's the news — engineers at a very clever school called MIT looked hard at puffins and said, 'Aha. Let's build a robot that does that too.' They tried lots of wing sizes. They tested and tested. And they made one that flies about as fast as a bicycle, dives under a lake, and pops back into the sky in less than a second!"

He picked up his tiny brass gear. "When people watch animals and copy their cleverness, we call it biomimicry — bio (life) plus mimicry (copying). Every time you see Velcro, think of sticky burrs. Every time you see a submarine, think of a fish."

"Oh!" said Leo. "Like when I watched my dog wag his tail and figured out how to shake sand out of my socks!"

Pip clapped his paws. "Exactly right! Scientists borrow ideas from animals all the time — because nature has been solving problems for millions of years."

He handed each kid a paper airplane. "Now you try. Pick any animal you love — a squirrel, a hummingbird, a spider. What is it really good at? And what could we build if we borrowed that trick?"

The lamp in Professor Pip's laboratory glowed warm and amber. On his big wooden workbench sat a huge, ancient dinosaur skull — long and duck-billed, with a mouth full of flat plant-chewing teeth.

Mia, Leo, and their friend Beatrix leaned in. Pip adjusted his crooked spectacles, held up his magnifying glass, and gestured to the fossil's nose.

"Detectives," he whispered, "we have a Cretaceous crime scene."

Right in the bone was a huge, curved, broken TOOTH — nearly the length of a banana.

"Oh my whiskers," said Beatrix. "Is that — ?"

"A Tyrannosaurus rex tooth," said Pip. "And it's stuck. Right. In. Its. Nose."

"WHOA," said Leo.

Pip's tail curled. "This poor Edmontosaurus — a friendly plant-eater with a beak like a duck — met a T. rex 65 million years ago. Detectives, what does this tooth tell us?"

Mia squinted. "That the T. rex bit it in the FACE?"

"Precisely! And here's what's clever." Pip pulled two small toys from his pocket — a plastic banana and a chunky wooden block. He smooshed the banana with the block. The block bounced off unharmed. Then he grabbed a pencil and pressed the tip against the block. CRRRACK! The pencil tip snapped off, stuck in the wood.

"To snap a tooth clean off in bone," Pip said, "takes a tremendous amount of force. Force is a push or a pull. And this bite was a giant push! We know because the tooth broke, and the tooth stayed. That means T. rex bit down HARD — with force scientists measure in pounds, and it's more than any other land animal alive today."

"So it was hunting?" asked Beatrix, quietly.

"Maybe," said Pip. "Or maybe it found the Edmontosaurus already resting and had a big scavenger snack. The clue is in the bone: it didn't have time to heal. When you scrape your knee, your skin grows back and looks a little different. This bone never did that — so the bite happened right at the end, or after."

"Oh!" said Mia. "Like when I found a broken cookie in the jar and figured out my little brother did it because his hand still had crumbs?"

"Exactly right!" said Pip, delighted. "That's what a paleontologist does — they read the story an animal left behind, one bone at a time. This fossil is 65 million years old, and today, we cracked the case."

He looked up at his shelves of fossils and rocks, a whole silent history sitting on wood. "Every stone has a story, my detectives. What's the story you'll read tomorrow?"