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Hi, I just wanted to add my two cents to Jennifer's question. Here at Iowa, the first paleontology course is a principles course. We spend less time focusing on the taxonomy and more time on the methods that paleontologists use. We have two major projects in the course - morphometrics of gastropods and paleoecology of molluscs from the South Florida area. We have two field trips and a few labs which are designed to introduce the students to basic systematics and morphology. This course has evolved into the extreme opposite to the course the Jennifer has described. I think there are plenty of things that you can do with fossils behind just taxonomy. You just have to be creative and have access to good fossil collections. You can do any of the following: 1)You can put together a bunch of specimens together for a morphometrics project and have students make measurements using calibers and do statistical analysis on those measurements. 2)You can have the students code a bunch of species and use Paup to construct the evolutionary relationships between those species (I've also done this where the students just draw their own trees). 3)You can put a bunch of taxa together with known age ranges and have students do a biostratigraphic zonation. (You can do something similar with paleobathymetry if you give depth ranges of fossils instead). 4)Certainly paleoecology is great and you can have the students either do descriptive paleoecology or something more statistical. 5) A nice lab on taphonomy/preservation is always nice. I'm out of ideas... John ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- John P. Dawson Ph.D. Candidate - Department of Geoscience 121 Trowbridge Hall, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 E-mail: jdwsn@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu; Phone: (319)-335-1818; Fax: (319)-335-1821
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