Glow-In-The-Dark Dinosaur Fossil Hunt

The museums of the dinosaur trail (a series of museums across Montana with bones, fossils, and other prehistoric paraphernalia) are set to open for the summer season on Memorial Day weekend.  Hoping to jump back onto the trail this year, I've been looking for ways to gear up some dino-related excitement in the house.

So, when I saw glow-in-the dark, build your own fossil sets from Ja-Ru (who make excellent little dino-digs) hanging tantalizingly from the shelf in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, I snatched one down with glee.

My thinking was, that I could leave the "fossils" out in a window all day on Wednesday (we have church Wednesday evenings, and the younger girls are up well past dark that evening anyway)...

...and then place them around in our nice dark basement, not exactly hidden, but where they wouldn't be terribly obvious...

...unless the lights were off.

It would have worked great if:

1. The fossils actually glowed in the dark for longer than 30 seconds once the lights were off (I would suggest buying an inexpensive wooden set, and painting it with glow-in-the-dark paint, instead).
2. I had remembered that by staying up late, the girls would be growing tired, and might not be up for too much of a challenge (I probably shouldn't have mixed the two sets that came in the together, or spread them over the entire basement).
3. I had made a map of the hidden pieces, so completely lost pieces could be found.
4. I hadn't snapped a few of the bones in half while breaking them free of the packaging.

Actually, the last two probably didn't matter so much.  We simply glued the broken bones back together (not all fossils found in the field are intact, you know).  And, as rain set in for the rest of the week, and we were stuck inside anyway, we took our time searching (most digs take more than one expedition to complete), and finally found every last piece (with great cheers and accolades to the finder of the final fossil), last night.

It might not have been the exactly the experience I was aiming for, but we are much more focused on fossils now than we were a week ago.