Make a Rubber Chicken Leg

You know how your parents always tell you to drink your milk? Well, they know milk is a good source of calcium, a mineral that adds strength to bones.

If your bones were only made of minerals, like calcium, they would be hard but also brittle, which means they might easily break when you fall off your bike or trip over a toy. So God included another ingredient—collagen—to make your bones give a little. Collagen is made of flexible fibers to help your bones bend without shattering.

We can thank God for designing our bones with both hard minerals and flexible collagen so we can explore his world without easily falling apart.

Materials

• chicken drumstick with no meat
• small jar with lid
• vinegar

Experiment

Imagine if we didn’t have any minerals in our bones. We couldn’t clap our hands or hit a baseball. We would be all wobbly. But, hey, we don’t have to imagine it. Let’s experiment to see what bones would be like without one of those important minerals—calcium.

1. The next time you eat fried chicken, clean all the meat off the drumstick and save the bone.
2. Next, place the bone in a small jar and ask an adult to pour in enough vinegar to completely cover the bone.
3. Twist the lid on the jar, and let it sit for two weeks. Be patient. It’ll be worth it.
4. In two weeks, when you pull it out, the bone will be flexible enough to tie into a knot.

What was the trick? Well, you know how your mouth puckers and your eyes water when you taste or smell vinegar? That’s because vinegar is an acid, and it’s powerful enough to dissolve the calcium in the chicken bone, leaving the flexible collagen.

Hello there! I’m Buddy Davis, the host of Out and About on Answers.tv. Let’s get our hands a little dirty as we investigate God’s amazing creation.