AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH FOR TEACHING INVERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY

Students in a traditional Invertebrate Paleontology are typically required to identify, sketch and memorize the morphologic features and chronologic ranges of major fossil phyla. Often this traditional method is mundane and seen as unnecessary by many students. Integrating new learning strategies involving specific case studies into an Invertebrate Paleontology course creates a unique learning environment and provides students with important observational and critical-thinking skills as well as key geologic concepts that can be applied beyond the Paleontology lab. Today it is critical for students enrolled in an Invertebrate Paleontology course to develop the skills to critically evaluate and identify faunal assemblages and to place them into a temporal framework as opposed to an exclusive focus on morphology in a traditional taxonomy-based course.

During the spring 2005 semester, students were enrolled in a newly created Invertebrate Paleontology course that incorporated whole rock and faunal assemblage studies. The redesign of the traditional Invertebrate Paleontology course used case studies representing significant faunal assemblages unique to specific periods in the history of life. Students were required to identify each species preserved in the rock samples, describe the lithologic characteristics, and interpret the depositional environment. The culmination of these efforts was a paleoenvironmental reconstruction within a spatial and temporal framework. Through the process of whole rock analysis, the class retains concepts of taxonomy and morphology while expanding the discussion of evolution and history of life through time.