11-Year-Old Asks Smithsonian: "What Up With That?"

Fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam is the first person to notice an error at the Tower of Time exhibit, which opened in 1981. Apparently, the exhibit mistakenly identifies the Precambrian as an era:

Last week, the boy received a letter from the museum acknowledging that his observation was "spot on."

"The Precambrian is a dimensionless unit of time, which embraces all the time between the origin of Earth and the beginning of the Cambrian Period of geologic time," the letter says.

The solution to the problem would not involve advanced science but rather simply painting over the word "era," the note says.

While no previous visitors to the museum had brought up the error, it has long rankled the paleobiology department's staff, who noticed it even before the Tower of Time was erected 27 years ago, said Lorraine Ramsdell, educational technician for the museum.

While this may seem very interesting and all, the only reason for posting this was to give me the opportunity to type "Kenton Stufflebeam."