Lesson Plans
As a Duke Provost’s Fellow with the Triangle Center for Evolutionary Medicine, I designed two K-12 lesson plans that follow NC Essential Standards and/or Next Generation Science Standards, which can be downloaded below.
Illustration of “Darwin’s finches” by John Gould, as found in The Voyage of the Beagle, 1845. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Adaptations and Evolution
Grade level: 8-12
This lesson plan integrates concepts from evolutionary biology and paleontology to teach students about the adaptations of placental mammals: what they are, how they arise, the three different types of adaptations, and how to identify them from living animals and from skeletons. The lesson consists of a PowerPoint presentation followed by an activity worksheet. Students will engage with static images and virtual (or printed) 3D models of arm and hand bones of unidentified animals to identify the structural adaptations they see and discuss how they may help the animals survive. They then examine three primate species to determine which hand seems better suited for a particular activity. They reflect on their experiences through the worksheet and watch a short YouTube video to learn about how paleontologists address the difficulties the students may have faced.
Lower limb of human (left) and gorilla. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
“Upstanding” citizens: Examining the evolutionary relationships between human morphology and bipedalism
Grade level: 6-8
Habitual bipedalism is an important development in human evolution. While hypotheses for the development of bipedalism are numerous, there are certain skeletal characteristics that clearly point toward this mode of locomotion in fossil remains. In this activity students will engage with 3D scans of real fossils of primates (including humans and extinct human relatives) and non-primates to identify these characteristics in the femur, pelvis, and cranium to predict modes of locomotion. They will be evaluated on their accurate in-class completion of the attached worksheet. Developed jointly by Amanda Rossillo and Rebecca Cook.