there are two stories in this series:
Show-and-Tell
by Anton Zuiker
Matthew Burgner was riding to his Alamance County school one morning with his mother, Denise Burgner, talking about his classes and what he might share at the next show-and-tell. Denise works as an administrator for the Carolina biology department, and she'd read a newspaper article about Jennifer Taylor's crab study.
Perhaps he'd want to share that with his classmates, she asked.
"Science is my favorite subject in school," Matthew says. "But crabs kind of scare me. At night at the beach I'm afraid they'll bite me." He and his mother nevertheless agreed that this would make an interesting report.
So eleven-year-old Matthew read the Science article. Just a few words tripped him up, he says, but he got the gist of the research: "Dr. Taylor and Dr. Kier found out that crabs have two skeletons. Nobody really knew that yet," he says. He reported the discovery to his class.
)
Matthew
Burgner with a dried lizard. "Science is my favorite subject in
school," he says, "but crabs kind of scare me." Photo
by Jason Smith; click
to enlarge.
Matthew's teacher also had his students observe June bugs and beetles. Those are insects, of course, but they may use the same skeletal conversion that Taylor's crabs do. (That's the tantalizing suggestion at the end of Taylor's paper.)
Denise Burgner arranged for Taylor and Bill Kier to autograph Matthew's
copy of the journal, which he says he'll store in a special corner of
his bedroom alongside his test tubes filled with mosquitoes, a dried-out
lizard, and a set of alligator claws. "I'm studying the skink now
and how their tails fall off," Matthew says.
