Course Syllabus
Lectures: TuTh, 1:00-2:15 PM Geology Building 522
Polly Office Hours MW, 12:05-1:00 PM Geology Building 524A
Overview
Course Description: Vertebrate paleontology is the study of the history of vertebrate life from fossils and the geological record. This course will introduce you to the biological and geological principles of studying vertebrate evolution in the context of Earth history, including morphology, phylogeny, taxonomy, evolution, biomechanics, biogeography, paleoenvironments, and stratigraphic history.
This semester we will use a hands-on “flipped classroom” approach in which we spend most of class time working with fossil material from the Early Eocene of North America, an important time when many living groups of mammals first evolved (primates, horses, carnivores, rodents, artiodactyls) and which followed one of the most sudden climatic events in Earth history, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). You will learn to identify, interpret, and analyze fossil material to better understand the patterns and processes affecting terrestrial life at that critical time.
GEOL G412 and G512 meet together, but with different assessment requirements.
Objectives: (1) to gain practical experience identifying, analyzing, and interpreting vertebrate fossils; (2) to develop transferrable scientific skills of making observations (including quantitative data collection), developing hypotheses, testing hypotheses (including quantitative analysis), making use of the scientific literature, integrating new information into an existing body of scientific knowledge, and making formal conference-style presentations; (3) to develop transferrable geological skills of integrating paleontological, sedimentological, and stratigraphic data to reconstruct patterns and processes in the geological past; and (4) to gain a broad understanding of Earth history over the last 100 million years.
Assessment
Mini-Presentations: During the course of the semester, you will be working in small groups on particular clades (groups) of fossils. Your group will give four mini-presentations that focus on practical skills such as morphological identification, data collection, analysis and interpretation, and use of scientific literature. These skills are an essential component of the course objectives and therefore receive strong weight. It is through these exercises and subsequent discussions we will learn many of the principles of paleontology. (Undergraduates: 35%; Graduates: 20%).
Notebooks: You will compile reference notebooks for your clade (fossil group) that will serve as a personal manual for identifying, analyzing, and understanding vertebrate fossils. These will be graded at the end of the semester for organization, detail, and comprehensiveness. The notebooks will be important resources for completing the class project final, so completed notebooks will be shared for use by everyone (Undergraduates: 15%; Graduates: 15%).
Final Presentation: Groups will analyze and interpret fossils in class meetings and for assignments. At the end of the semester each group will synthesize the work they have done in a short conference-style presentation (Undergraduates: 20%; Graduates: 20%).
Project Final: At the end of the course, students will be assigned a take-home project that will require you to synthesize and evaluate fossil and stratigraphic data from sites that you have not seen before. You will compare these data with the data derived from the material we worked with in class to document a major Earth-life transition. (Undergraduates: 30%; Graduates: 25%).
Independent Report (graduate students only): Graduate students will complete a written report involving original analysis and interpretation in an area of your choice, possibly including phylogenetic analysis, morphometric analysis, or functional morphology. The topic may parallel the material from class, or it may be completely unrelated (Graduates: 20%).
Online Resources
Optional Textbooks
There are no required textbook readings for this course. Instead we will focus on original scientific literature. However, students wishing to purchase a reference text might consider one of the following.
- Rose, K. D. The Beginning of the Age of Mammals. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD. [ISBN: 978-0801884726; publisher price: $160]
This encyclopedic book provides the historical geological background for the early Cenozoic radiation of mammals and presents a detailed order-by-order review of mammalian diversity and evolution in the Cretaceous, Paleocene and Eocene. The detailed illustrations serve as a reference for high-level identification of fossil specimens. This book is closely related to the fossil material we will study in this course.
The E-book version is available through IU Libraries
- Carroll, R. L. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. W. H. Freeman and Company. [ISBN: 978-0716718222; out of print, used prices: $10-$100]
Carroll is the “classic” encyclopedic reference in vertebrate paleontology, being an update of Alfred Romer’s classic 1966 Vertebrate Paleontology. Carroll is illustrated with diagrammatic skeletons and contains more detail about their morphology and classification than Benton’, but has less about other topics.
Course Summary:
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