USING FOSSILPLOT GRAPHING SOFTWARE TO COMPLEMENT LECTURE, LAB AND FIELD TEACHING OF PALEONTOLOGY

Teaching the dynamic history of life is the core theme in university-level paleontology courses, where lectures on evolutionary theory are coupled with hands-on learning of fossil material both in the lab and in the field. Integrating a large faunal dataset within the course curriculum can facilitate these educational goals by encouraging students to explore the primary data used by professional paleontologists to recognize patterns in organic evolution.

To enhance active and quantitative learning of the fossil record, I have developed a new spreadsheet application of the Sepkoski Compendium called FOSSILPLOT. This software allows students to compile any combination of >36,000 marine animal genera to generate graphs illustrating faunal diversity and stratigraphic ranges for the entire Phanerozoic Eon. The large volume and full accessibility of the dataset gives instructors a versatile tool that can be integrated into lecture, lab and field studies in university-level paleontology courses. A series of exercises developed during two years of software testing in paleontology courses at the University of Utah and Idaho State University demonstrates the ease and utility of implementing FOSSILPLOT into the course curriculum.