REEFS AS THE CENTRALIZING THEME IN AN UNDERGRADUATE PALEONTOLOGY COURSE

Paleontology courses can provide rich opportunities for undergraduates to connect modern conservation issues (and students’ desires to help ameliorate the global environmental crisis) with an enlightened appreciation of the fossil record. Some students enroll in paleontology courses with a “why care?” attitude, unsure of the subject’s relevance in contemporary society. Using reefs as the centralizing theme in an undergraduate paleontology course can address that perspective and achieve multiple goals. Virtually all phyla that students traditionally encounter in paleontology courses include taxa who spend part or all of their lives in reef communities. Recent research¹ also reveals that reefs have been important “cradles” and exporters of generic diversity through geologic time. Thus, a reef-focused paleontology course can teach not only key concepts (invertebrate taxonomy and systematics; form and function; paleoecology; evolution; mass extinctions; etc.) but also the importance of biogenic buildups – and communities that inhabited ecosystems adjacent to these “engines of evolution” – from the past to the present.

In this talk, course format and student learning objectives will be discussed in the context of specially designed exercises, classroom discussions, labs, and reading assignments. Emphasis will be placed on approaches that – given the course’s core topic – are non-traditional for a college paleontology course, including a lab exercise on marine ecosystem services and a classroom debate that links childhood obesity and dead zones to reef health.² The course ends with a discussion about global change and reefs. This ensures that paleontology students have an informed perspective on what the fossil record portends about marine inhabitants during the Sixth Extinction. Most important, this approach guarantees that, by the course’s end, students will care about reefs and thus be more willing to help stem future biodiversity loss in the marine realm.

¹Kiessling et al., 2010, Science, 327:196-8; ²idea based on Orr, 2001, Conservation Biology, 15:1480-2.