First Burrowing Animals, Australia
Summary
Deep in the hills of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia scientists continue to study one of the most enigmatic stories in the history of life on Earth. This site preserves evidence of a dramatic change in the nature of the seafloor that occurred in the early Cambrian, 540 million years ago. As part of the so called "Cambrian Explosion", marine animals rapidly diversified and evolved new modes of life that allowed them to burrow vertically down into the sediments on the seafloor. Previously, the seafloor had been covered by microbial mats that early animals, called Ediacarans, rested on, fed on and moved across. With the appearance of new and more complex animals in the Cambrian, a revolution in burrowing took place that destroyed the microbial mat communities. This transformed the seafloor creating new ecological niches similar to those we see in modern marine ecosystems.
This is a self-guided virtual field trip.
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Context
Audience
This activity is designed for use in freshman introductory geoscience and life science courses (intro to physical geology, historical geology, paleontology), but can also be used in a wide array of formal and informal educational settings. It is a self-guided virtual field trip (VFT) with free exploration that gives the instructor maximum flexibility to customize the learning outcomes.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
Students should have some basic knowledge of the geologic time scale, types of rocks, and body and trace fossils.
How the activity is situated in the course
This is designed to be a stand-alone activity to be used after students have some basic knowledge of geologic time scale, rock cycle and types of fossils.
Activity Length
This activity involves free exploration so its duration is set by the teacher. Exploration of the virtual field site and embedded media (one image and one video) is estimated to take about 15 minutes.
Goals
Content/concepts goals for this activity
In this self-guided VFT, students explore a field site in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia that preserves fossil evidence of some of the first burrowing organisms in the early Cambrian, 540 million years ago. The free exploration format of this VFT gives teachers the opportunity to design and customize activity goals to fit their curriculum.
Suggested outcomes could include:
Learning outcome #1: Identify fossil evidence of burrowing organisms in these sedimentary rocks
Learning outcome #2: Determine whether these features are trace or body fossils
Learning outcome #3: Describe what type of organisms created these fossils and what they were doing
Learning outcome #4: Explain how burrowing changed the seafloor and how it affected the microbial mat ecosystems
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
Learners explore a virtual environment to located rare vertical trace fossils or tubes in the rock made by worms that were burrowing down into the sediments to feed.
Other skills goals for this activity
Making observations and recognizing patterns
Description and Teaching Materials
This activity is accessible at https://vft.asu.edu/ through the Center for Education Through eXploration (https://etx.asu.edu/) at Arizona State University. They build adaptive digital learning experiences for K-12 education that engage learners in virtual environments and bring Earth and space science to life.
Technology Needs
Real-time Internet access is required to view this VFT. We recommend the use of the browsers Google Chrome or Firefox for the best results. It is not optimized for viewing on mobile devices.
Assessment
There are no embedded assessments associated with this self-guided VFT and it is up to the teacher to design an assessment tool to meet whatever learning outcomes they specify. Students can be asked to answer an essay question explaining some aspect of the VFT experience.
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