Text Leveling System

Digging Up Dinosaurs

RDQ:	509	Max Word/Sent	24	Total Words	810		Diff Words	327
Lex	640	Ave Word/.Sent	9	Hi Freq occurs	511	63.1%	Hi freq	133	40.7%
AR	2.7	Long Sentences	1.1	Low Freq occurs	38	4.7%	Low freq	29	8.9%

Have you ever seen dinosaur skeletons in a museum?
I have.
I visit them all the time. I went again yesterday.
I saw APATOSAURUS.
I saw Corythosaurus.
I saw iguanodon and triceritops. I like to say their names.
STEGOSAURUS was just where I had left it. And TYRANNOSAURUS REX looked as fierce as ever.
TYRANNOSAURUS used to scare me. I still can't believe how big it is. Just its head is almost twice my size. I'm not afraid of dinosaurs anymore. Sometimes I call them "you bag of bones" under my breath.
I can spend hours looking at them.
I used to wonder where they came from and how they got into the museum. But now I know.
Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. A few of them were as small as birds, but most were enormous.
Some dinosaurs ate plants. Some dinosaurs ate the meat of other dinosaurs, and some may even have eaten the eggs of other dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs lived everywhere. They lived on every continent in the world. Then they died out. No one knows for sure why they became extinct. But they did. There hasn't been a dinosaur around for 65 million years.
Fossils are a kind of diary of the past.
They are the remains of plants and animals that died long ago.
Instead of rotting or crumbling away, the remains were preserved, and slowly turned to stone.
Fossil hunters found more and more big bones in different parts of the world.
Scientists studied the fossils.
They said the bones and teeth and footprints all belonged to a group of giant reptiles that lived on earth for millions of years.
The giants were named DINOSAURIA, or TERRIBLE LIZARD.
What finds these were!
People crowded into museums to see them. But the dinosaur bones didn't just get up and walk there.
They had to be dug out of the ground, slowly and patiently.
Even today, digging up dinosaurs is not an easy job. A team of experts must work together.
This is how fossil hunters work. First, they have to find a dinosaur. They search along riverbanks and in quarries. They climb up high cliffs, and down
into steep canyons.
With luck, someone spots a fossil bone poking through the rock.
The site is covered with a tent, and the work begins.
Sometimes the fossil is buried so deep, the rock around it has to be drilled or blasted.
Tons of rubble are carted away.
Scientists chip at the rock close to the fossil. They brush away the grit.
They have to be very careful.
As soon as a bone is uncovered, it is brushed with shellac.
The shellac helps hold the bone together, so it won't crumble.
Then the bone is numbered.
Sometimes a skeleton has to be cut apart so that it can be moved.
The draftsman draws each bone in its exact position, and the photographer takes pictures.
That way, there can be no mix-up later, when someone tries to put the skeleton together.
When the bones are ready to be moved, they are carefully wrapped.
Small bones are wrapped in tissue paper, and put into boxes or sacks.
Large bones are left half-buried in rock. They will be dug out later, in the museum. These fossils are covered with a plaster cast, just as a broken leg is.
Each bone is then packed in straw, put in crates, and taken to the museum.
At the museum, scientists unwrap the fossil. They finish digging it out of the rock. They study the bones.
They compare the bones to other dinosaur bones. They compare them to the bones of other animals. They try to figure out what size and shape
the dinosaur was.
They try to find out how the dinosaur stood and walked, and what it ate.
If there are enough bones, scientists are able to build a complete skeleton.
A frame is made in the shape of the dinosaur to support the bones.
The bones are wired together, one by one. They are held in place with pieces of metal. If any bones are missing, plastic or fiberglass ones are made to replace them.
You can hardly tell the new bones from the old. After many months the work is complete.
The dinosaur skeleton looks just as it once did.
Until recently, only a few museums had dinosaurs. Then scientists learned to make copies of the skeletons. The copy is hard to make.
It takes a long time.
The original skeleton has to be taken completely apart, bone by bone.
A mold is made for each bone.
The new pieces are made of fiberglass. A fiberglass dinosaur is just as scary as the original, but much stronger and lighter.
Now museums all over the world have dinosaur skeletons. And many people can spend hours looking at them, the way I do.

Subjective Criteria

Simple graphics supplementary to text comprehension

Speech Bubbles

Unconventional format

Vocabulary: Some difficult words

Language: Few descriptive words

Sentences: Multiple phrases

Text structure: Oral/Natural

Inferences: Some implications

Complexity: Several ideas - closely related

Captions

Charts

Features

First Person

Difficult names

Topic

Dinosaurs

Extinction

*Animals

Animals: Prehistoric

*Animal Life

Low Frequency Words

apatosaurus	corythosaurus	diary	dinosauria	draftsman
extinct	fossil	iguanodon	lighter	museums
numbered	original	patiently	photographer	plaster
preserved	quarries	recently	riverbanks	rotting
rubble	shellac	stegosaurus	studied	tissue
triceritops	tyrannosaurus	uncovered	wired