A full group of little boys and girls got a glimpse of a millipede at the Port Jefferson Library on Monday afternoon during the Cave Explorers program.
An instructor from The Whaling Museum and Education Center in Cold Spring Harbor taught children all about caves from the creatures that lived inside them (like the millipede pictured above) to the stalactites hanging from the ceilings and fool's gold that unsuspecting prospectors mined out in California during the Gold Rush in the 1800s.
As a part of the program kids also got to make their own cave paintings by crushing chalk with mortar and pestle and adding water. They mixed salt in water and used pipe cleaners to start the process of crystallization and they learned how water erodes minerals to hollow out caves.
Along with a live millipede the instructor also brought actual stalactites and geodes for children to touch while they learned all about caves.
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