The Deep Biosphere Laboratory at Goteborg University consists of about 10 people whose unifying interest is in microbial life in underground and sub-seafloor environments. Visitors to the site can access summaries of research projects, personnel information, and links to publications on the topic of underground and sub-seafloor microbes. Research topics include microbes in deep Swedish and Finnish ... Full description.

This site is a portion of a larger program in which users construct a world and the life that inhabits it. Marine botany is the subject of this site, and users are instructed on how they can 'evolve' their own plant species to meet the characteristics of specific marine environments. Although the goal of this activity is to create imaginary species, it is based on having the user develop an understanding ... Full description.

This site is maintained by the Digital Learning Center for Microbial Ecology. A Microbe Zoo and the Microbe of the Month are included. The site provides some background material on many different types of Microbes, in ponds, around the deep sea vents, and various other locations. Two water regions are represented on the site, although mention is made of several others. Full description.

NASA and Russian scientists have been selected to take the search for life in the solar system to the frozen reaches of Earth. Life forms (from diatoms and bacteria to mammoths) preserved in the Siberian permafrost can yield evidence about how life has changed on the molecular level and provide a treasure trove of ancient enzymes, proteins, and biochemicals. The ecosystems of the ice and permafrost ... Full description.

For ecologists, the horseshoe crab is an important creature- a vastly adaptable organism that predates most species on the planet, with a lifecyle that is interlocked with other animals. Users can view information, photographs, and diagrams that explain the anatomy, range and habitat, lifecycle, ecological niche, reproductive cycle, and medical uses of the horseshoe crab. Full description.

The purpose of this resource is to quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of a classification system. Students sort birds into three possible classes based on each bird's beak: carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores. Students compare their answers with a given set of validation data. Full description.

The purpose of this resource is to observe plant green-down and report greendown data to help validate estimates of the end of the plant growing season. Students monitor the change in color of selected leaves of trees, shrubs or grasses. Full description.

This computer activity is an introduction to cladistics, which organizes living things by common ancestry and evolutionary relationships, enabling us to better understand life's present diversity and evolutionary history. The predictive power of cladistics can be used to answer questions that cannot be answered by observation of a living organism, such as "What did dinosaurs taste like?" This site ... Full description.

Ediacara Biota are the first convincing fossils of Precambrian animals that were found in the Ediacara Hills of Australia. The unusual fossils, originally interpreted as jellyfish, strange worms, and frond-like corals, gave scientists their first look at the animals that populated the Precambrian seas. In Canada, Ediacaran fossils are found in the Northwest Territories, Yukon, British Columbia, and ... Full description.

This lesson plan is part of the DiscoverySchool.com lesson plan library for grades 9-12. It centers around fossils found in the Burgess Shale in western Canada. Topics include body shapes of fossils found, the movement of organisms from oceans to land, and whether organisms existed that did not fossilize. This part of geologic history began in the Cambrian Sea about 540 million years ago. The resource ... Full description.