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Mid-Devonian Fossils — A Trip to Elma, New York

Module 1: Setting the Stage for a Virtual Field Trip to Western New York to Collect Fossils

Essential Questions:

  • Has the Earth always looked the way it does now?
  • If not, how has it changed?
  • How do we know about the Earth’s past geology?
  • What is the geologic timescale based on?
  • Why do scientists not always agree about events in Earth’s past?
  • Why do scientists constantly refine the geologic timescale?
  • What caused past mass extinctions?
  • What may be causing present and future mass extinctions?

Review of Continental Drift

  1. Small groups of students are given 11 laminated maps of Earth ranging from the Mid-Cambrian Period (520 Ma) through the Mid-Neogene Period (11.5 Ma) and are to arrange them in order from oldest to most recent. Each map has the Period name on the back to give them clues (and to review the order of geologic history’s major periods). The teacher has an answer key.
  2. Students are to work on their own initially attempting to order their maps based on logic and hopefully prior knowledge, this also should be a good review of past and present continental and oceanic geography.
  3. The groups will then be asked to share the order that they placed their maps, and to justify why they ordered them the way they did (‘think, pair, share’).
  4. Next, students will be given a laminated graph of the mass extinctions that have occurred since the Cambrian. They should be allowed to hypothesize about the causes of the mass extinctions, hopefully linking them, in part, to the Earth’s changing landscape.
  5. Again, the groups will be expected to share and to justify their hypotheses with the class.
  6. The next step is to give each group a laminated geologic timescale. Students should use the scale to check the order of their original 11 maps of the Earth. They should then hypothesize about why scientists have set up the geologic time scale the way they have within their groups.
  7. The groups will then present their conclusions to the class.
  8. Lastly, the teacher should debrief the activity with an explanation of the history of the geologic time scale based on geological and fossil record observations. This should reinforce the students’ understanding of the above and clear up any misunderstandings the students may have had which were brought out in the above activities.