Paleontology

By Josh Kuhlman

There is a new bone-rattling class at CHS; that class is called Paleontology, and it’s taught by Delacy Humbert, who has been a paleontologist for over 20 years. The Paleontology class is a combination of Biology, Geology, and Earth science focused on vertebrae dinosaurs. Next year, Freshmen, Sophomores, and Juniors can participate in Paleontology.

As in most science classes, Mrs. Humbert discusses, but unlike in other classes, this teacher tells tales of dinosaurs, like the one about her first dig, or when she found the first set of T-rex ribs, or working on Jurassic Park 3 and how awful it was; she also gives her students labs, mostly on geology and biology. The class does labs on finding the age of rocks, cleans up fossils, and writes articles on the fossils they cleaned.

Like students in some other science classes, Paleontology students do dissections, the most recent one being the breakdown of pigeons and their feathers. In the feather assessment, they “probed” the feathers and observed them under a microscope. When the piece of the feather was under the microscope, they exclaimed things like,” cool”, or “awesome,” but one gave a pretty vivid description of it looking like “sandy waves.” I was able to look through the microscope, and at 300 times zoom, it did indeed look like “sandy waves.”

Mrs. Humbert’s class is alternately calm and chaotic, almost like a Disneyland event. Certainly, like most classes, hers laughs, talks, and most of the time gets off track, but 90 percent of them get their work done. One of the oddest things about the class is that the loudest table isn’t the giant clump of people in the middle table; it is a small group five. They talk about the most absurd things like, “What’s creepier centipedes or spiders?” Then one pulls up a picture of a centipede combined with a spider. The table absolutely loves to get off track, but 4/5 of them finished their lab, so most of them can balance, talk, and work.

Overall most members of the class are fun to be around. One of the students there is a junior named Seamus Whyte. Whyte loves the Paleontology class because of the hands-on activities that they do. He said, “The teacher is great; Mrs. Humbert is awesome.” The labs that Mrs. Humbert gives are usually on biology and geology, and Whyte’s favorite is geology.

Over the summer, Mrs. Humbert hosts a two-week, not required, dig where participants dig bones for her next year's paleontology class. They clean up the bones the find, and if a bone are big enough, the class will write and publish a paper about it, which is one of Mrs. Humbert's dreams. The class is overall fun and challenging with the students in there making it even better.