This website provides students with an introduction to the history of life and how it resulted in today's biodiversity. There are three tiers of difficulty available for different grade levels. During this tour students learn about geologic time, fossils, ancestral relationships, cladograms, variation, natural selection, and extinction. Students learn that life has been around for a very long time and is the result of evolution. They learn that fossils provide evidence of past life, that much of past life is now extinct, and that evolutionary relationships of organisms can be illustrated as cladograms. Using the Galapagos finches as an example, students learn the importance of variation and natural selection in evolution, as well as the biodiversity we see on Earth today. The teacher's section provides all necessary information for implementing this module, including lesson plans, handouts, and assessment ideas.
This resource originally cataloged at:
