You can see:
- A pair of pine needles (one inch long), to show the scale;
- from left to right, a rock, a piece of animal bone, a rock, and a rock.
I moved the bone and took another photo:
I camped in the same spot for three days and saw this object every day. Not until the last morning did I realize that it was a bone and not a rock! The photos look very much like what I saw.
Sometimes what we think we see depends on what is on our minds. If we see lots of rocks, we might miss the fact that the next thing is not a rock, especially if it looks a lot like a rock. It happened to me by accident. Then I set up these photos and took them to create a puzzle for you.
In science, a tendency such as in this example, thinking that anything whitish-gray is a rock, is called bias (pronounced BYE-us). It might happen because we expect the object to be a rock. It might also happen because, for some reason, we would like the object to be a rock. Bias gets in the way of seeing things as what they really are. It gets in the way of finding the truth.
I love spending time in the wild and catching cool sights, such as this brown-colored black bear, sniffing and thumping around near our camp. My husband and I named him Mosey.
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