The goal of the PALEOMAP Project is to illustrate the plate tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years. In the section on Earth history you can select any time period, read about that period, and see the plate distribution during that period. There is also a section on climate history where you can ... Full description.

The New Millennium Observatory (NeMO) is a seafloor observatory off the coast of Oregon, which studies the relationships between submarine volcanic events and the chemistry and distribution of hydrothermal vents and the biologic communities that depend on them. The research activities at NeMO provide an extraordinary educational opportunity, both from the daily reports from expeditions at sea and ... 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 lesson plan is part of the Center for Educational Resources (CERES), a series of web-based astronomy lessons created by a team of master teachers, university faculty, and NASA researchers. In this lesson, students gain a deeper understanding of cosmology by gathering evidence for the Big Bang theory. They explore the Hubble Law and create a model of the expanding universe. This lesson contains ... Full description.

This lesson plan is part of the Center for Educational Resources (CERES), a series of web-based astronomy lessons created by a team of master teachers, university faculty, and NASA researchers. In this lesson, students analyze characteristics that indicate human life cycles, then apply these principles to various NASA images of stars to synthesize patterns of stellar life cycles. This lesson contains ... 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.

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.