Category: Uncategorized

Listen to some of the scientists who work on the Burgess Shale fauna.

BBC Melvyn Bragg (43 minutes long)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Biomarkers

This is an interesting article from the UK Science Magazine, New Scientist. It looks at the use of biomarkers or chemical fossils to tell us about the nature of the biosphere when there are few if any body fossils to help. You will see that this casts light on what we discussed in class and also on the nature of some of the “Big 5” mass extinctions that we will discuss in class.

The article makes a number of very good points and one that impresses me most is that it is good for us to remember that complex metazoans represent only a fraction of the total Biomass of the Earth and that microorganisms, including the archaebacteria and eubacteria still really rule the earth and could easily do so again in the future. “Big” life is very vulnerable and poorly adapted for significant environmental change as we shall see in future classes.

I really do not have the room to spend much time on this debate in class, but as I know many of you are interested, here are a couple of web sites that you can look at for further information.

Panda’s Thumb

Talk Origins

I do not support or agree with any of the content of these sites, I give them to you “as is” and you can add comments to this page if you find anything weird or wonderful.

Having broken the taboo of Wikipedia, lets make it even more iconoclastic and move on to YouTube. These is a lot of material on YouTube in the field of evolution and you can all look for yourselves if you want to explore further. Some is good science. Some is overtly atheistic and much is rooted in fundamentalist creationist theology. A good test for how you are getting on in this course will be how well you are able to critically analyze some of these vignettes, and make comment on where they depart from scientific observation and reasoning, and venture into speculation and conjecture

This is a link to some good videos on YouTube

This series of around 1 hour is presented by John Maynard Smith




I hear faculty criticize Wikipedia all the time. I have to disagree. It is an excellent first stop on the way to understanding and researching topics in Earth Sciences. Students should feel free to use it, but not to reference it too many times in their papers. For this, they need to try to get closer to some original sources, many of which are freely available online through the library, and others are referenced at the end of Wikipedia articles. I encourage all students to take time and look at the Discussion Tab next to the article tab. This will let you know if the subject or any of the entries are at all controversial. Britannica is also available free to students online through the library and this is also a good option for a “first look”. Beyond encyclopedias, students should just check the library for texts on paleontology and especially Netlibrary.

Just spent most of the weekend working on the Wiki concept and trying to give the class more of an idea of what is actually expected of them. This is a level three course in natural sciences, and as such it was never going to be easy. I wonder some times if some of the students were expecting 3 credits for a Discovery Channel tour of fossils. There is much more to paleontology than that, but I still believe that none of this is too difficult for this class, most of whom appear eager to learn and dedicated to their work. My idea now is that students will post their work in to the Wiki site rather than submit it to me as a paper. It means that everyone gets to see the work of other students and that can be daunting, but it is also an incentive to put more work into the course.