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En este cómic/libro de actividades, conocerás a científicos que utilizan ideas evolutivas para resolver problemas médicos. También aprenderás sobre los árboles evolutivos mientras resuelves rompecabezas científicos y completas una actividad. 

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In this printable comic/activity book, you'll meet scientists who use evolutionary ideas to solve medical problems. You'll also learn about evolutionary trees while you solve science puzzles and complete a craft.

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Durante el último mes, las cepas del SARS-CoV-2 Omicron han dominado los noticiarios del mundo. Esta variante de rápida transmisión ha llevado a limitar viajes, a cancelar planes de vacaciones, al agotamiento de los kits de pruebas, a la vuelta de los confinamientos, y además a un asombroso número de nuevos casos de COVID-19. Los científicos rápidamente se han puesto a estudiar Omicron, intentando entender qué tan rápido se transmite, qué tanto nos enferma, y si es resistente a los tratamientos, a las vacunas, y a los anticuerpos de infecciones de COVID previas. Necesitamos revisar todas estas cuestiones porque Omicron es muy diferente de otras cepas de coronavirus. Omicron ha acumulado más de 50 nuevas mutaciones en comparación con la cepa que empezó la pandemia. Además Omicron no es un descendiente de la cepa Delta, responsable de la anterior ola de infecciones. De hecho, Omicron es tan diferente de otras variantes que parece que ha estado evolucionando por su cuenta durante muchos meses. Y esto nos conduce a otro misterio que los científicos están tratando de resolver: ¿dónde estaba Omicron escondido mientras toda esta evolución tenía lugar?

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This news brief from January 2022, explores the evolutionary mystery at the heart of the Omicron COVID-19 surge.

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La ciencia usa muchas evidencias diferentes para reconstruir los árboles filogenéticos que nos muestran como se relacionan las especies entre sí.
Este artículo se encuentra en Evolución 101.

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In this lab activity, students examine authentic morphological and phylogenetic data of three fish families and then pose and test alternative hypotheses about the fishes' classification.

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This lesson introduces students to the building of cladograms as evolutionary trees, showing how shared derived characters can be used to reveal degrees of relationship.

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Use these quick and simple classroom activities to better develop your students' tree-thinking skills. Each takes just a few minutes and helps reinforce key ideas about tree reading and common ancestry.

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In the this interactive video, college students guide viewers through problems on phylogenetics and address some of the misconceptions that many students have with the subject.
This resource is available from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

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Tree thinking, or phylogenetics, is an important way of understanding evolutionary relationships. Reading trees correctly can pose some challenges. This video introduces the basics of three reading and addresses common problems in tree reading.
This resource is available from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

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Print this 18x24" poster for your classroom wall. For ideas about how to use the poster in your class, visit Two- and Ten-minute Trees">Two- and Ten-minute Trees.

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Print this 28x36" poster for your classroom wall. For ideas about how to use the poster in your class, visit Two- and Ten-minute Trees.

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This interactive web resource allows you to follow any branch on the tree of life to find out how scientists hypothesize all the species on Earth (plus some extinct lineages) are related to one another.

This resource appears at the Tree of Life website.

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Students compare the sequence of amino acids in a gene shared between humans and six other organisms and infer evolutionary relationships among the species.

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By examining specimens, students fill in a data matrix of animal taxa and complete exercises to learn about synapomorphies, mapping characters on a phylogeny, and assessing parsimony.

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This set of five PowerPoint slides featuring personal response questions (i.e., multiple choice questions that can be used with "clicker" technology) can be incorporated into lectures on the mechanisms of evolution in order to actively engage students in thinking about evolution.

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Learn about phylogenetic systematics, the study of the evolutionary relationships among organisms, and how the field is shaping biological research today.

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Diseases like SARS, HIV, and West Nile Virus may be new to humans, but they are old news to other species. These and other emerging infectious diseases have recently added humans to the list of hosts they infect. An evolutionary perspective can help us better understand and, we hope, control this problem.
This article appears at SpringerLink.

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This case study in the form of a set of PowerPoint slides examines the evolution of trichromatic vision in old world monkeys.

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Download a poster of the entire Tree of Life, calibrated with a timescale.

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The setting for this case study is a paleontological dig in East Africa, where an undergraduate student has unearthed part of what appears to be an ancestral human skull. Students read the story and then examine a number of primate skulls. They are asked to build a phylogeny based on their observations.

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In this lesson, students will examine a beautiful tree of life poster by artist Ray Troll and use it as a launchpad to explore evolutionary, or phylogenetic trees. Students will take a pre-assessment to address misconceptions about phylogenetic trees before completing a modeling activity to give them a better understanding of how trees are used to model evolutionary relationships.

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This activity uses a simple puzzle to get students to use cladistic thinking without bogging them down with terminology.

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This interactive module examines evidence from the fossil record, behavior, biomechanics and cladistic analysis to interpret the sequence of events that led to flight in the dinosaur lineage.

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The Evolution Lab contains two main parts. In the first, students build phylogenetic trees themed around the evidence of evolution, including fossils, biogeography, and similarities in DNA. In the second, students explore an interactive tree of life and trace the shared ancestry of numerous species.

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Students create three-dimensional trees in the form of mobiles so that the branching nodes pivot. Students can manipulate the mobile to see the relationships more clearly and combat common misconceptions about trees.

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Students explore molecular data from Homo sapiens and four related primates and develop hypotheses regarding the ancestry of these five species by analyzing DNA sequences, protein sequences, and chromosomal maps.

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Students focus on the evolution of three species of lizards using real data sets — geographical and geological data, then morphology, and finally molecular data — to determine possible phylogenetic explanations.

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This research profile follows ornithologist Kim Bostwick through the jungles of Ecuador and the halls of museums as she investigates the evolution of an exotic bird's complex mating dance.

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This research profile follows scientist Satish Pillai as he studies the evolution of HIV within infected individuals. His research uses the tools of phylogenetics to investigate vaccine development and the possibility of curing the disease.

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This research profile follows scientist Chelsea Specht as she pieces together the evolutionary history of tropical plants and their pollinators--and in the process, tries to figure out how to conserve endangered species.

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Students build a phylogenetic tree from pipe cleaners that allows them to rotate branches, compare topologies, map complete lineages, identify informative phylogenetic features, and examine the effects of superficial structural changes on the tree.

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Evograms convey information about how a group of organisms and their particular features evolved. This article explains how to read evograms and delves into the evolutionary history of whales, tetrapods, mammals, birds, and humans.

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This article describes practical applications of phylogenetics, focusing on intriguing cases ripe for deployment in classrooms — like using phylogenetics to investigate crimes.
This article appears at SpringerLink.

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Scientists use many different lines of evidence to reconstruct the evolutionary trees that show how species are related.
This article is located within Evolution 101.

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This short slide set explains uniformity and variation in the process of photosynthesis across all life using evolutionary history. Save the slide set to your computer to view the explanation and notes that go along with each slide.

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In a flexible multisession laboratory, students investigate concepts of phylogenetic analysis at both the molecular and the morphological level. Students finish by conducting their own analysis on a collections skeletons using the Mesquite software.

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Many disciplines within biology (and many basic biology texts) have come to depend on evolutionary trees. Get the basics you need to understand and interpret these key diagrams.
This article appears at SpringerLink.

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This pamphlet with self-quizzes provides students with a self-paced tutorial in tree thinking and corrects many common misconceptions about phylogenetic trees.

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Recently, political unrest in Madagascar has threatened to set back the island's expanding conservation efforts, and criminals have taken advantage of the instability, looting protected forests for rare wood. This news story from October 2009 turns back the clock to consider the biogeographic processes that made Madagascar into a biodiversity hotspot in the first place.

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This news brief, from January of 2006, traces the source of the SARS virus. Using phylogenetics, biologists have come up with a plausible path of transmission which may help us prevent future outbreaks of diseases such as HIV, SARS, and West Nile virus.

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The earth is facing a biodiversity crisis. Nearly 50% of animal and plant species could disappear within our lifetime. To stem this rapid loss of biodiversity, we'll need to act quickly — but where should we begin? This news brief, from December 2008, explains how evolutionary history can help us set conservation priorities.

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This news brief from March of 2008 describes scientists' discovery of a new mammal species, a giant elephant shrew. Though elephant shrews resemble regular shrews, recent genetic evidence suggests that elephant shrews actually sprang from a much older (and perhaps more charismatic) branch of the tree of life - the one belonging to elephants and their relatives.

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This news brief from October 2013 describes the discovery of four new species of legless lizard. Why don't we just call these animals snakes? Because of their evolutionary history...

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In March 2010 German researchers announced that they had managed to extract DNA from the 40,000 year old fossil bone from a child discovered in a Siberian cave and that it didn't match up to the known genetic sequences of either humans or Neanderthals! This news brief examines the evidence in more detail and considers what that evidence might — or might not — mean about such claims.

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First described in 1981, HIV is a distinctly modern disease. But for how long before its discovery did HIV lurk unnoticed in human populations? This news brief from November 2008 describes new research offering insight into when (and how) HIV got its start.

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This news brief, from March 2012, describes the discovery four new species — all miniature chameleons — and explores the concept of island dwarfism.

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This news brief, from January of 2007, describes the role of phylogenetic evidence in a Libyan court case. Six medical workers have been convicted of injecting children with HIV-tainted blood - but the evolutionary history of the virus paints a different picture.

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Even as the world loses species at an unprecedented rate, conservationists are struggling to save them. But where should they focus their efforts? This news brief from September 2009 describes new research suggesting that evolutionary history is an important factor in determining which species are at the gravest risk of extinction.

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This news brief, from November 2012, describes what a new dinosaur fossil from North America has to tell us about the evolution of feathers.

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Students construct an evolutionary tree of imaginary animals (Caminalcules) to illustrate how modern classification schemes attempt to reflect evolutionary history.

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Students "take a trip" to the Greater Antilles to figure out how the Anolis lizards on the islands might have evolved.

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In this set of advanced lessons, students use different types of data to infer/interpret phylogenies among domains, within the vertebrates, and within primates while reflecting on how they answer the question "What do you think it means to be human?" and choose a characteristic that changed substantially in the human family tree to develop a scientific argument based on evidence for when the character evolved.

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In this web-based module students are introduced to cladistics, which organizes living things by common ancestry and evolutionary relationships.

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Phylogenetics has affected almost every area of biology - even the most basic one: how we classify organisms. Find out how phylogenetic classification works and what its advantages are.

This article appears at SpringerLink.

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This interactive phylogeny of the ray-finned fishes lets users dynamically explore the evolution of fish traits, as well as read stories about the evolution of unusual characteristics such as bioluminescence and venom.

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Continuando la celebración del tema de Octubre en el Año de la Ciencia, las ciencias de la tierra y el planeta Tierra, la historia de este mes se centra en cómo la geografía y la geología han moldeado la evolución de la vida en uno de los lugares más singulares de la Tierra. Madagascar, la cuarta isla más grande del mundo, se encuentra en el Océano índico a varios cientos de kilómetros de la costa sureste de áfrica y constituye el hogar de una notable variedad de especies vegetales y animales, incluido el aye aye, la fossa, el camaleón y el árbol baobab...

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¿Si tu casa se incendiara, que es lo que te llevarías cuando estés huyendo? La decisión puede ser difícil entre juguetes de niños, álbumes de fotos y documentos importantes compitiendo por tu atención. Desafortunadamente, nos enfrentamos con una decisión difícil cuando tenemos que definir nuestros esfuerzos de conservación. Las actividades humanas podrían estar desencadenado la sexta extinción masiva de la Tierra...

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El tema de septiembre, biodiversidad y conservación, en celebración del Año de la Ciencia, la historia de este mes esta basada en el enemigo de la diversidad: la extinción. El mundo se enfrenta a lo que podría ser la sexta extinción masiva. Estamos perdiendo especies a un ritmo sin precedentes — 100 a 1000 veces más alto que a lo largo de la mayor parte de la historia de la tierra...

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