Last year was the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species.  One of the activities I was involved in was work with a group of middle school students to explore some of the ideas shown in the Wordle that I designed used the nifty program at wordle.com.

We had planned three activities to help the students see how fossils were important to Darwin, and to also show that Darwin used geology as as an important aspect in the future development of his theory to explain how species changed over time. Here are the activities we did.  Following the description of the activities is the slide show in YouTube form I used to help the students explore these ideas

Mystery at the Ringgold Road Cut. In this activity, the students were given a bag of crinoid stems that I had collected from lower Paleozoic rocks in Northwest Georgia (as shown in the photo here), a hand lens, and a metric rule.

Crinoid stems used in an activity with student in which they make observations and inferences about these "mystery" objects.

Sedimentary bed containing crinoid fossils in NW Georgia

They were asked to investigate the objects, and use observations of the fossils to pose questions, and make conclusions about what they thought the objects might be.

Being a Palentologist. Into brown paper bags, we put a fossil and a geological time scale that included drawings of organisms associated with the three geological eras. Students picked up a bag, and then proceeded to use their powers of observation to try and interpret when the fossil might have lived and in what kind of environment. When they had an idea, they could pick up a sheet of paper with further information about their fossil. Fossils included: brachiopod, oyster, petrified wood, shark tooth, amber, coprolite, fern, fossil fish, trilobite, sea urchin, dinosaur bone.

The Footprint Puzzle. We provided the students with a footprint showing two sets of fossil tracks (of dinosaurs). The students used the tracks to discuss what they thought might be going on. In the map of the tracks, the tracks converge and at the point of convergence, there tracks overlap each other. After some discussion, students make the inference that there were two dinosaurs, and they met up, and either mated, or had a fight. When then provided them one additional piece of information. The additional information showed only one set of tracks exiting the area of convergence.

In the movie that follows, we used images of Darwin’s voyage around the world, images from Down House, Darwin’s family, a picture and reading of the letter he received from Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858 that shocked Darwin into making his theory of natural selection public, and indeed, his and Wallace’s papers were read at the Linnean Society in London in 1858.  Enjoy!