Siya Gupta (6)

Armed with a magnifying glass and a notepad, Gupta began digging. Her family had just driven up the Rocky Mountains in Denver, but rather than taking in the scenery, her attention was fixated on a dirt mound twice her size. Clawing into the ground with fierce determination, she revealed a white slab in the ground and labeled it as a dinosaur bone. She remembered from a book she previously read that an abundance of dinosaurs had roamed the Rocky Mountains, making it a suitable place to find the bones of one. 

“I could not pick it up so I just showed it,” Gupta said. “[My dad] wanted me to [find] more fossils, so I kept digging but I couldn’t find one more.” 

Ever since she had learned about dinosaurs in school, Gupta became an aspiring paleontologist, immediately interested in the history of dinosaurs. Through reading books from the library, she has amassed fun facts about all kinds of dinosaurs, her favorite being the T-Rex. Her dad has helped her through the process by writing questions such as the age and type of the dinosaurs and to enforce her understanding.

“My dad used to put questions on the back [of a page],” Gupta said. “If I’m confused — because that was the first time I was learning — I would turn it around to just see a little hint and then turn it around so I can figure it out.”

When Gupta was learning about states and capitals, her dad would also give her a sheet of paper with questions about the capitals of states, their primary industries and other defining questions to help with her memorization. Whenever she gets stuck, such as when she forgot the capital of Hawaii and the volcanoes, she would search up the answer online. Reading and researching has helped enforce Gupta’s learning. Just last week, when Gupta went to the dinosaur section of an exploratory museum, she was able to identify what a mystery dinosaur was solely based on its bones. 

“There were magnifying glasses there to put them around your neck and to identify what dinosaur they were,” Gupta said. “So I [said] it was a T-Rex and I was correct. I had books about T-Rexes, and I saw the bone head of it and I remembered that they were the same.” 

She hopes to continue reading more books on dinosaurs in the future. She excitedly recounted multiple fun facts from the backstory of the length of T-Rexes’ arms to the bone structure of the spikes growing on the back of Stegosauruses. The dinosaur Gupta believes she would get along with the most is the Apatosaurus.

“They’re not meat eaters, they’re vegetarians, so they just eat leaves,” Gupta said. “I would even climb on to [their] backs because they’re really gentle.”