This website integrates video footage and information with lesson plans and activities to teach students about the intertidal zone of the oceans. This zone is a habitat for only a few species due to extreme fluctuations in moisture level, heat, salinity, and sunlight. The activities in this unit are designed to enable students to investigate the creatures of these zones and how they have adapted to ... Full description.

This website integrates video footage and information with lesson plans and activities to teach students about the concept of relative dating. Students will graph a range chart for ammonites, determine the geologic age for several rocks, and determine which rocks will be most useful for oil companies looking to drill oil. This site contains lesson plans, student worksheets, discussion questions, and ... Full description.

In this lesson, students experience the historical discovery of fossils which increasingly link whales to earlier land-dwelling mammals. This experience also reveals how scientists can make predictions about past events based on the theory that whales evolved from certain groups of early land mammals. Such predictions suggest the age and location of sediments where fossils of early whales would most ... Full description.

This activity concerns the evolution of three species of lizards on the Canary Islands. Its purpose is to demonstrate to students that evolutionary problems are complex and solutions may involve data from various disciplines of science. First, students must arrive at different phylogenetic solutions using only geographical and geological data. Then they compare the morphology of the species involved, ... Full description.

In this lesson students compare differences in amino acids in the beta hemoglobin from representative primates, complete a matrix of those differences, and from these data, construct and interpret cladograms as they reflect relationships and timing of divergence. Full description.

This lesson is based on an article that explains what cladistics is, why it is useful, how it is applied, and what its limitations are. Students will learn that biological classification is intimately associated with evolution; that there are many problems encountered in classification, which is evidence that the living world is a work in progress, and evolution provides an explanation for those problems. ... Full description.

In this lesson students working in teams classify furniture, share their categories and rationales, then note how their different schemes vary arbitrarily. They then see how living organisms are classified, and note how these groupings are natural, nearly always reflecting the same ancestral relationships in nested hierarchies, regardless of the deeper criteria. Such patterns are revealed with a look ... Full description.

This lesson on natural selection shows students that population characteristics can change as a result of selective pressures operating over several generations. In the lesson, groups of students go hunting for beans in the lawn. Each group has a different tool (e.g. hand, spoon, fork, etc). There are three different colors of beans. The hunting goes for three rounds (generations), with extinctions ... Full description.

In this lesson, students will learn that some evolutionary change is rapid and discontinuous, and some change is gradual; how fossil evidence can provide clues to the past; and how speciation may account for evolutionary branching and diversification. Fossil shells of a land snail are arranged by layers of age into a sequence pattern suggesting gradual change, or punctuated equilibria. Students will ... Full description.

This site introduces a group of dinosaurs called ornithischians. There were many kinds of ornithischian dinosaurs dating back to the early Jurassic. The Ornithopoda included the hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs), the iguanodontids, the heterodontosaurs, the hypsilophodontids, and various others. The Ceratopsia included the horned dinosaurs, while the Ankylosauria and Stegosauria (now usually grouped ... Full description.