Overview

"Big History" is the currently active effort to bring together in a unified way all of the information about the past, both humanistic and scientific. One of the problems for anyone teaching Earth history or Big History is how to help students (or anyone) to comprehend the time scales. This series of graphic panels helps address this challenge by presenting Big History in a sequence of time scales.

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Overview

In this series of lessons students learn the basic principles used to determine the age of rocks and fossils by using half-life in radioactive decay and stratigraphy.

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Overview

You might be surprised to learn that descendants of an ancient bacterium are living in every cell of your body! Find out how endosymbiosis factored into the evolution of your own cells and learn about a modern example of this process.

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Overview

This excerpted chapter from Carl Zimmer's book, The Tangled Bank, describes the evolutionary processes responsible for large scale patterns in the diversity of life through time. Reprinted with the permission of Roberts and Company Publishers, Inc.
This resource is available from the National Center for Science Education.

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Overview

This resource presents Big History in a sequence of time scales through graphic panels. Each panel is accompanied by a page of text, discussing the historical features shown in the panel.

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Overview

This web-based module leads students through an exploration of the patterns in the diversity of life across planet Earth. Students are scaffolded as they practice data interpretation and scientific reasoning skills.

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Overview

In lecture three of a four part series, evolutionary biologist David Kingsley examines the original objections to Darwin's theory and shows how modern evidence supports the theory.

This lecture is available from Howard Hughes' BioInteractive website.

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