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.

This lesson plan is part of the DiscoverySchool.com lesson plan library for grades 9-12. It explains what ice ages are, what causes ice ages to occur, plants and animals that lived during the last Ice Age, and why some Ice Age animals went extinct. It includes objectives, materials, procedures, discussion questions, evaluation ideas, suggested readings, and vocabulary. There are videos available to ... Full description.

Adaptation and Speciation is a lesson plan about organisms and how they adapt to their environment. Topics include morphological, physiological, and behavioral animal adaptations; types of animal deception and camouflage; and the geographic, genetic, and reproductive isolation that leads to speciation. The lesson plan provides objectives, skills, time required, content outline, materials, significant ... Full description.

In this lesson amino acid sequences in cytochrome-c are compared for several different animals, and the number of differences found are used to infer degrees of relationship. This data is also compared with a cladogram constructed for those same animals from their anatomical features, providing an example of independent confirmation. Full description.

This site describes the fossils found in the fossil-rich calcareous nodules (Swedish: orsten) which occur in dark organic-rich shales known as alum shales in the upper Middle Cambrian and especially the Upper Cambrian of the Cambrian continent Baltica. These fossil-rich nodules were known for a long time as a source of excellent macrofossils, but they also provide a number of incredibly well-preserved ... Full description.

This site describes the Ordovician period, which is best known for its diverse marine invertebrates, including graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, and the conodonts (early vertebrates). A typical marine community consisted of these animals, plus red and green algae, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals, crinoids, and gastropods. The tectonics segment describes Gondwana, discusses the northwards drift ... Full description.

This demonstration of natural selection has students select candies from a bowl, giving them an opportunity to think about what traits brought about the survival of some candies. After this activity, students will realize that not every feature of an organism is an adaptation, but features often reflect their evolutionary history. Adaptations often persist in a population because they are in some ... Full description.

This discussion of evolution presents the multiple lines of evidence that converge to tell the story of life through time. Topics include fossil evidence, transitional forms, similar characteristics due to relatedness, distribution in time and space, and evidence by example. A quiz and glossary are also provided. Full description.