Fossil Record and Evolution

Virtual Field Trip

The University of California Museum of Paleontology has a Paleontology Portal. Students can explore time and space, and browse through a fossil gallery.

The Non-vertebrate Paleontology Lab in the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT Austin hosts Fossil Roulette, an engaging online activity for students to learn about fossils that are part of curated museum collections. If your school would like to adopt a fossil, it will be included in Fossil Roulette.

Actual Field Trip

The Texas Memorial Museum, at the University of Texas in Austin offers the Hall of Geology and Paleontology Exhibit which is a walk through fossil time and a working Paleo Lab.

The University of El Paso's Centennial Museum has the Paleontology Gallery.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science offers the Morian Hall of Paleontology

The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History offers DinoLabs and DinoDig.

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science, in Dallas, offers the T. Boone Pickens: Life Then and Now Hall.

• Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Career Resources

Julia Clarke is a Professor and John A. Wilson Fellow in vertebrate paleontology in the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who studies birds and other theropod dinosaurs to better understand major transitions in the history of life. She is particularly interested in how structures in living animals developed and how novel ways of moving—such as avian flight and wing-propelled diving—evolved. She travels around the world to find fossils that have the potential to answer these questions--China, South America, Mongolia, and even Antarctica! She emphasizes curiosity, perseverance, resilience, and interdisciplinary thinking, and integrative collaboration with scientists from other fields as essential to a successful career in paleontology. To find out more about her research, career and lab at UT Austin, click here. Julia Clarke is also one of the founders of the Geoscience Ambassadors Program, which is working to cultivate a larger and more diverse geoscientific community by challenging participating geoscience students to document their different pathways into the geosciences, present these authentic stories to young people, and catalyze and influence in their home communities; report what they learn about how geoscientific pathways are perceived by members of their home communities and how they could be better supported; and lead a support network for prospective, incoming and graduating students in the geosciences.

Lisa White is a paleontologist and the director of education and outreach at the UC Museum of Paleontology. She lived in San Francisco since age 5, and grew up near the California Academy of Sciences, where she always enjoyed museum exhibits on rocks, minerals and fossils. As a junior at San Francisco State University, she enrolled in a geology class and was drawn to the subject matter. She received encouragement from the instructor to pursue geology as a major. After that, on an internship at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, her love of and expertise in geology and paleontology grew stronger from the mentoring she received from professional geoscientists. In her third summer interning at the USGS, she began working on a project involving deep marine sediments and microfossils. She was hooked on fossils as a geological specialty, and in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, she specialized in diatom microfossils and their applications to dating deep marine rock sequences around the Pacific Rim and interpreting ancient environments. She is also an alumna of San Francisco State, where her parents met in the 1950s, and she was a member of the geosciences department faculty from 1990 to 2012.

Jasmine Nelson is a Master's Student in Paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin working with Dr. Julia Clarke. She graduated from DeBakey High School for Health Professions in 2015, where she was interested in both veterinary medicine and orthopedics. She went to the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, TX - oil capital of Texas - to pursue a BS degree in Geology. Though it was an eight hour drive from home, it was within 3 hours of almost all geologically interesting sites in Texas! There, she focused on the Wink County sinkholes in Wink, Texas and their further development. After getting her BS in Geology in 2019, she moved to Austin, Texas where she is pursuing her Master's degree. She is developing proxies to predict the hearing capabilities of extinct reptiles at UT Austin. She plans to pursue her PhD and go on to become a professor at a predominantly undergraduate university.

Grace Musser is a Geoscience Ambassador, Ph.D. Student at the University of Texas at Austin, and visual artist. Her pathway to geoscience was a meandering one and began with an interest in art. She first majored in Studio Art as an undergraduate and created large oil paintings inspired by natural history dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, which she still creates and exhibits today. She then interned at the Museum as an exhibit preparator, aiding in creating large dioramas for traveling exhibits. Working with scientific curators and artists at the Museum led her to double major in Anthropology and go on to earn her Master's in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology. During this time she began to study extinct and living dinosaur anatomy and evolution, which led her to earning a doctorate in Geology at UT Austin where I she continues to research the evolutionary relationships of these animals. Honing her visual skills for so long has given her an advantage in studying anatomy, especially fossilized skeletons and soft tissue, as paleontology is a field where much of the data and data processesing requires keen visual discernment. Her unique background also allows her to come up with creative solutions to scientific problems. Because of this she encourages creative people, especially artists, to not rule out a career in geoscience. To learn more about her research and art, click here. 

Humberto Venancio is a Geoscience Ambassador and Geology Major at the University of Texas at Austin. His faith compelled him to study Geology and dinosaur Paleontology, despite being from a disadvantaged socio-economic background where he was taught that jobs had to be paychecks above all else. At a very young age, he was exposed to dinosaurs and would become a toddler junior paleontologist. He remembers doing everything from playing with toys to leading digs and expeditions in the sandbox on the playground. He never outgrew this love and that passion has driven him every step of the way. He was also raised Catholic. From a young age, he was taken to Mass and Sunday School. It was in middle school that he first started to fall in love with his faith. At the same time, he was at a private school where his loyalty to science was challenged. In high school, his faith deepened futher, but it was also challenged more than ever. Despite this internal schism between science and faith, he found a way to resolve the issue after lots of thought, research, and prayer. It could have been easier to simply choose a side but instead he swam in the gray. He encourages anyone who struggles between two choices to have the courage to examine if the situation isn't as simple as it seems.

*This unit engages the student through readings, videos, and hands-on activities that introduce, reinforce, and provide mastery of how life evolves on a dynamic Earth and continuously modifies the Earth. Using fossils and the fossil record, significant events throughout geologic time is traced. This unit includes an entertaining TED talk by Paul Sereno. Curriculum in this unit is vertically aligned with to the prerequisite biology course.

*The website Fossils in the Field: Real and "Virtual" Experiences, from UCMP-Berkely, gives guidance and suggestions for going into the field and for creating meaningful "virtual" experiences in the classroom.

The Deep History of Life on Earth biointeractive is an excellent "engage" activity designed to provide students an overview of the 3 billion year history of life on Earth. The interactive emphasizes that deep time and Earth history are keys to understanding the present. We recommend that teachers introduce students to the geologic time scale and to the phylogenetic tree of life prior to students starting the activity. After students have had time to explore the interactive on their own, teachers should go through timeline events with the class asking questions and providing additional information to the students.

* Information about the phylogenetic tree can be found on Tree of Life Web Project.

Dr. Andrew Knoll's lecture, Changing Planet: Past, Present, Future, is best shown in multiple parts on different days. The lecture imparts a lot of information, much of which will be new to students. The video is indexed for ease of selecting content if time is an issue. We recommend previewing the lecture to best determine an appropriate student activity such as: a vocabulary list, a set of guiding questions, or a work sheet.

*The Burgess Shale of Middle Cambrian age (508 million years old) is one of the earliest and most important fossil beds. Teachers should provide an overview of the Burgess Shale and its importance in the fossil record to their students before beginning the next activity. Jerry Adler's short article (2013), How the Burgess Shale Changes Our View of Evolution, provides a good synopsis. In addition, we recommend the Royal Ontario Museum website on the Burgess Shale.

The Fossil Record is a creative application of how structure and function in organisms led to success during the Cambrian Period. The activity includes a strong research and writing component. Students will need Internet access and access to materials to create their project animal/diorama. An assessment rubric and discussion questions are included.

Stratigraphy and Evolution: Using Fossils to Tell Deep Time is an engaging and effective hands-on activity in which students learn about the earliest concepts of determining geologic age, or dating, of rocks using fossils. Teacher preparation is required as the needed manipulatives must be downloaded. Materials and background information is found via the link at the bottom of the page, "General Information for Teachers." An exploration of William Smith's concept of faunal succession, Charles Lyell's early application of relative age dating, and the subsequent influence on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as developed on The Beagle is included. This activity works with students of all ages, from elementary to college.

The TED Talk Digging up dinosaurs by Paul Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago and Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, explains his work in the field as he investigates early dinosaur evolution. Students will appreciate learning about his career path from a "failing" secondary school student to art major then to the science of paleontology. The talk ends with a discussion of how to recruit students into science fields. We recommend teachers prepare a worksheet for students to complete while watching the talk and lead a class discussion afterward. This video is also available on YouTube, but under the title Paul Serano: What can fossils teach us?

Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized is a board game that takes about two hours. Students play in teams. The game involves competitive play and collaborative learning. Be sure to review the rules before playing the game with your students. Instructions....

Citations

Adler, Jerry (2013), How the Burgess Shale Changes Our View of Evolution, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013, available online at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-burgess-shale-changed-our-view-of-evolution-3678444/#Tcjm8edpP09xCIit.99, accessed 18 June 2015.

Olson, H.C. 2011. Stratigraphy and Evolution: Using Fossils to Tell "Deep Time," TXESS Revolution, http://www.txessrevolution.org/FaunalSuccession, accessed 18 June 2015.