| Lesson Title (Description) | Grade Level | Lesson Type |
A Long Time
The teacher puts up a timeline that shows students' age relative to geologic time. |
K-2 |
Classroom activity |
Extinction
Students are shown illustrations of living things and extinct life forms, which they compare and categorize as living or extinct. |
K-2 |
Classroom activity |
Adventures at Dry Creek
In this interactive web-based module students conduct a simulated field study at a fossil dig in Montana. |
6-8 |
Web activity |
What Came First?
Students sequence actual events in the history of life on Earth and place them on a large timeline. |
6-8 |
Classroom activity |
What did T. Rex Taste Like?
In this web-based module students are introduced to cladistics, which organizes living things by common ancestry and evolutionary relationships. |
6-8 |
Web activity |
Ancient fossils and modern climate change: The work of Jennifer McElwain
Wondering how global warming will affect our planet? Scientist Jennifer McElwain studies the fossil record in order to learn more about how global warming has affected life on Earth in the past and how it might affect life on Earth in the future. |
9-12 |
Article |
Evo in the news: More than morphology
This news brief, from August 2006, describes recent research on T. rex, with a special focus on how paleontologists move beyond the shape of the animal's bones to learn about aspects of its life that don't fossilize very well: its physiology, sensory abilities, and population dynamics. |
9-12 |
Article |
Evo in the news: What has the head of a crocodile and the gills of a fish?
This news brief, from May 2006, reviews what is likely to be the most important fossil find of the year: Tiktaalik helps us understand how our own ancestors crawled out of the water and began to walk on dry land. |
9-12 |
Article |
Evo in the news: When it comes to evolution, headlines often get it wrong
Newly discovered fossils are prompting some scientists to consider a minor revision of the relationships shown on the human family tree. This news brief from September 2007 clarifies the occasionally misleading news coverage of the story. |
9-12 |
Article |
Evo in the news: Where species come from
Lush tropical ecosystems house many times more species than temperate or Arctic regions. This news brief from November 2006 discusses the evolutionary explanation for this diversity trend and reveals why threats to tropical ecosystems may threaten diversity on a global scale. |
9-12 |
Article |
Explore life on earth
This short video would make a nice, brief introduction to a more extensive discussion of the history of life and common ancestry. Using computer-generated graphics, it traces the tree of life from its roots in the very first cells up to the diverse life forms that inhabit the earth today. |
9-12 |
Video |
Fossil and Migration Patterns in Early Hominids
Students plot the distribution of major hominid taxa on a world map to hypothesize about the origin and movement of prehuman ancestors. |
9-12 |
Classroom activity |
From soup to cells - The origin of life
Delve into our current understandings of the origins of life and how scientists are able to investigate the details of such ancient events.
This article is located within Evolution 101. |
9-12 |
Tutorial |
How to survive a mass extinction: The work of David Jablonski
Through detailed analysis of patterns in the fossil record, scientist David Jablonski reconstructs the rules that helped dictate who lived and died in past mass extinctions. This research profile describes his surprising discoveries and their disturbing implications for the biodiversity crisis today. |
9-12 |
Article |
Interview: Anthony Barnosky on climate change and mammal evolution
UC Berkeley Professor Anthony Barnosky gives the inside scoop on how climate change has affected past speciation of mammals and how it may affect biodiversity in the future.
This article appears at ActionBioscience.org. |
9-12 |
Interview with Scientist |
Interview: Nicole King on the origins of multicellularity
Biologist and UC Berkeley Professor Nicole King explains how she investigates a major transition in evolutionary history: the evolution of multicellular life forms from unicellular ones.
This article appears at ActionBioscience.org. |
9-12 |
Interview with Scientist |
It takes teamwork: How endosymbiosis changed life on Earth
You might be surprised to learn that descendents of an ancient bacterium are living in every cell of your body! Find out how endosymbiosis factored into the evolution of your own cells. |
9-12 |
Article |
Solving the Mystery of the Neandertals
An interactive and engaging web activity that compares the number of mutations in the mitochondrial genomes to determine ancestry and relatedness. |
9-12 |
Web activity |
The genes that lie beneath: The work of Leslea Hlusko
Evolutionary biologist Leslea Hlusko’s research takes her from the deserts of Ethiopia, where she hunts for hominid and primate fossils, to a baboon colony in San Antonio where she takes thousands of measurements of the primates' imposing canines. This research profile describes how the two projects are linked by a hunt for genetic variation, a key component of natural selection. |
9-12 |
Article |
Webcast: From butterflies to humans
In lecture four of a four part series, evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll uses the developmental genetics of insects to explain how old genes can learn new tricks and how this can help us understand human evolution.
This lecture is available from Howard Hughes' BioInteractive website. |
9-12 |
Lecture |
What did T. Rex Taste Like?
In this web-based module students are introduced to cladistics, which organizes living things by common ancestry and evolutionary relationships. |
9-12 |
Web activity |
