Paleontology science fair ideas? My daughter, age 8, wants to do her science fair project in paleontology. For the fair, we need to come up with a question that can lead to a hypothesis, then apply the scientific method to test this hypothesis. The wall we are hitting is that we don't know what kinds of tests paleontologists use in their work. Can anyone offer suggestions of where we can start to come up with our question, and what sort of tests would be useful in the process? I do not want the project spelled out for us, just a place to start so that we can learn along the way. Thanks. 

I just wanted to address the comment about science fair participation. We are homeschoolers. When I refer to us as we concerning my daughter's project, it is not because I am going to be doing her work for her, but because I am a part of the process. Also, I find that in homeschooling, I learn a lot, too. The work and ideas will be hers. Thank you for your concern. 

Further information: She is interested in prehistoric sharks. We have joined the Dallas (TX) Paleontology Society and will be going out to hunt fossils with them soon (and will continue well after the science fair). We traveled to UTA to talk to a micropaleontologist and learn about his work, and get ideas. He offered use of a high powered microscope (with enough notice), so that is a resource available to us. We have met Roger Farrish, who wrote a book of prehistoric sharks and rays of Texas. He is a resource. Homeschooling is more adventure than not. I keep asking, everywhere I can, for input from others int he paleo- fields as my background is in cultural anthropology, and culinary. We do appreciate your help.
Palaeontologists use lots of methods to investigate past life. 

Like most sciences these day, palaeontology is a growing field. More scientists are applying more methods in more sophisticated ways. The literature — what we 'know' — grows and grows. So palaeontologists use hundreds of different methods and tools today; indeed there's a whole journal dedicated to the subject!

But like a lot of other geological disciplines, it's more or less impossible to test a hypothesis rigorously, because there are no actual dinosaurs, they died out ages ago, and so we cannot know everything about them. So we have to get creative.

For example, a palaeontologist interested in how dinosaurs or early insects walked might...


Make detailed drawings of some fossils of the organism.
Use X-ray tomography to see through a specimen and look at a fossil in 3D.
Make a 3D computer model to look at how the animal might have walked.
Examine museum collections to look for evidence of a hypothesized gait, eg in field photos or in casts from actual outcrops — perhaps there's a track out there somewhere!
Look at the chromosomes of similar modern animals to determine lineages and 'shared DNA', and compare walking styles.
Build or 3D-print an actual model and see if it actually does what the scientist thinks.
Dress up like a dinosaur or dragonfly and walk around on a beach or mudflat to study the footprints. (I'm sort of but not really joking.) 


(Google around dinosaur locomotion for more!)

I realize you can't do all of this sort of thing for a science fair, but hopefully it illustrates that, when it comes to hypothesizing about the past, we have to come at problems from a few different angles, using high and low technology.

Hope this helps a bit, good luck with the project!!