Island Biogeography and Evolution is an activity about the evolution of three species of lizards on the Canary Islands. It is designed for high school biology students. Its purpose is to demonstrate to students that evolutionary problems are complex and solutions may involve data from various disciplines of science. First, students must arrive at different phylogenetic solutions using only geographical and geological data. Then, students compare the morphology of the species involved arriving at a more traditional solution to phylogeny. Finally, students deduce a phylogeny based on genetic distance using DNA sequences from cutting edge biotechnology.

Prehistoric Journey, the museum's newest permanent exhibition, offers students and teachers the opportunity to explore the history of life on Earth through spectacular fossil specimens, interactive exhibits, and re-created environments depicting crucial points in life's history. A rich array of educational resources and programs are offered in conjunction with this exhibition. Opportunities for K-12 students include guided and unguided visits for school groups, Classroom Adventures on prehistoric subjects, an outreach assembly program, and the Prehistoric Universe show in Gates Planetarium. Teacher resources include teacher workshops, the comprehensive Prehistoric Journey Educators' Sourcebook, the Prehistoric Journey Previsit Video for Teachers (including portions for students in Spanish), and the Prehistoric Journey: A History of Life on Earth exhibit book. Prehistoric Journey educational materials and programs are correlated with the Colorado Standards for Science Teaching. All of these resources and programs, ordering information, and registration procedures are described in the museum school brochure which is mailed to Colorado schools and teachers in August (with an update in January). If you are not currently receiving this brochure, please call (303) 370-6314 to be placed on the mailing list.

The Present wave of dinosaur mania makes it easy to utilize a student's interest in the former masters of the Earth to introduce a wide variety of concepts. Students are already familiar with the names and habits of many of the animals, but familiarity can accomplish much more. Stephen Jay Gould (1991) asks, “Could we not immediately subvert more of the dinosaur craze from crass commercialism to educational value? … Dinosaur facts and figures can inspire visceral interest and lead to greater wonder about science. Dinosaur theories and reconstructions can illustrate the rudiments of scientific reasoning.” We fervently share Gould's tenet that dinosaurs can be used as a medium not only to teach students about the way science works but to introduce a broad range of thinking skills as well.

Take One dinosaur, add a class of students (any age), mix liberally with an experiential standards-based curriculum, and you have the delightfully successful effort in systemic reform called “The Dinosaur Education Project.”

Microfossils are the tiny remains of bacteria, protists, fungi, animals, and plants. Microfossils are a heterogeneous bunch of fossil remains studied as a single discipline because rock samples must be processed in certain ways to remove them and microscopes must be used to study them. Thus, microfossils, unlike other kinds of fossils, are not grouped according to their relationships to one another, but only because of their generally small size and methods of study. For example, fossils of bacteria, foraminifera, diatoms, very small invertebrate shells or skeletons, pollen, and tiny bones and teeth of large vertebrates, among others, can be called microfossils. But it is an unnatural grouping. Nevertheless, this utilitarian subdivision of paleontology, first recognized in 1883, is very significant in geology, paleontology, and biology.

Foraminifera (forams for short) are single-celled organisms (protists) with shells or tests (a technical term for internal shells). They are abundant as fossils for the last 540 million years. The shells are commonly divided into chambers that are added during growth, though the simplest forms are open tubes or hollow spheres. Depending on the species, the shell may be made of organic compounds, sand grains or other particles cemented together, or crystalline CaCO3 (calcite or aragonite).

Introducing Students to microfossils in the K-12 curriculum can be a rewarding and exciting experience for both instructor and student. Students, even those who collect fossils as a hobby, are generally unaware of microfossils. Exposure to microfossils opens up a whole new world of inquiry, and the extent to which that inquiry is developed can be adjusted to the grade-level and interest-level of the individual student.

When I meet new people and they find out that I'm a paleontologist working for an oil company, the second question they ask (after “What is a paleontologist?”) is usually “Why would an oil company hire one?” Most people think of dinosaurs or, at the very least, trilobites and other invertebrate fossils when they think of paleontology. However, most of the rock samples available to those engaged in finding and developing hydrocarbon resources are in the form of “cuttings.” Cuttings (Baker, 1979) are the small pieces of rock broken up by the drill bit and brought to the surface by the fluid which lubricates the drill bit and removes the cut rock from the bottom of the drill hole. If the bit encounters dinosaur bones or clam shells, they are so broken up in the process as to be almost unusable. Microfossils on the other hand, by virtue of their small size, can be recovered whole. Microfossils also happen to be abundant, especially in marine rocks, which are the most common form of sedimentary rock in the crust of the Earth.

Foraminifera Represent a group of marine, microscopic, shell-producing organisms belonging to the Protista. Many of these organisms are benthic (bottom-dwelling), and their distribution reflects variations in substrate and characteristics of bottom waters. Other foraminifera are planktonic (floating), giving us insight into the nature of surface water masses around the world. The integration of the study of foraminifera into the life sciences and earth sciences classroom creates an opportunity for students to exercise critical thinking skills in applying the variety of knowledge they have learned in their current curriculum. This scenario is particularly true in the middle school classroom with students at an age where they are moving between concrete learning and more abstract thinking skills. Encouraging students to think about how information learned in class pertains to foraminifera forces them to process abstract concepts and apply them to a concrete example.

The objective of this exercise set is to integrate knowledge from several scientific disciplines and learn something interesting about the way the world works. I want to use some basic principles from physics, biology, and geology to see how a large scale planetary process, the transport of heat over the earths surface, operates and has operated over time. This topic is of basic scientific interest, and it has real importance to the growing societal interest in global climate change. This applies whether natural variation in climate or human induced change are under discussion. The set of exercises that follows will examine how energy is absorbed by the earth from the sun; how and why this energy is distributed over the earth's surface; what controls energy distribution; how we can track the energy distributing process using the oceanic microfossil record; and what that record shows us about variation of heat distribution with time. This is an exercise in global climate change because the climate system is driven by the heat distribution process.

One of the basic tenets of geology is the present is the key to the past. In the present context, this simply means that if we document the distribution of organisms today and have some degree of understanding of what combination of environmental variables controls those distributions, then we can use this information to reconstruct past environments by using the fossilized representatives of the modern organisms as paleoenvironmental indicators. This classic use of microfossils, along with biostratigraphy, is of great significance in the search for oil and gas.

This compilation of resources has no pretensions of being complete. Whereas some commercially-produced materials are included, the focus is on free and inexpensive materials and opportunities available both nationwide and locally. A large number of governmental organizations such as state geological surveys and professional organizations of paleontologists, geologists, and biologists have produced materials for distribution at minimal cost. In addition, many professional societies, state geological surveys, county to federal parks, and amateur societies provide educational opportunities “in the field”, where classes can visit fossils where they occur in nature, either to observe them or, where fossils are abundant and conditions are safe, to collect them to take back to the classroom for further study.