This "web syllabus" is designed as a supplement for the Fall 2007 Invertebrate Paleontology course at The College of Wooster. For course specifics, please see the notes at the end of this page. Don't miss the systematics listing. Following each week's topics I will add links, images and other items to illustrate the material and provide additional information (and alternative views). This is a living document, so it will change weekly, sometimes daily, during the semester. I may be only a week ahead in the addition of links and other items. The schedule of assignments, of course, will remain constant. You can think of this page as a web newsletter for the course. If you have ideas for this page, please send me a message. You may also want to refer to our "Invertebrate Paleontology at Wooster" webpage and our History of Life course webpage. We are particularly proud of our Paleontology and Sed/Strat Independent Study webpages.

Geology 250 is a writing intensive ("W") course which fulfills in part the writing requirement at the College. As such it has an emphasis on writing as a primary means by which scientific ideas are explored and expressed. It is important to note at the beginning that while the writing assignments in this course are significant, they include as much instruction as evaluation.

Welcome to Invertebrate Paleontology!

Mark A. Wilson

Department of Geology

The College of Wooster

Wooster, OH 44691 USA

mwilson@wooster.edu

Schedule of Lecture and Laboratory Sessions

(With Weekly Links to Other Web Resources)

 

Lectures in Scovel Hall Room 205, Tuesday & Thursday, 8:00 - 9:20 a.m.

Lab Sessions in Scovel Hall Room 216, Tuesday & Thursday, 1:00 - 2:20 p.m.

August 28 & 30

Web Resources for Week #1:

Welcome! There is such wonderful paleontological material on the Web. Come here often!

I'll assume from the start that you all know the Geologic Time Scale, but just in case you need a little reminding, here is a clever test you can take on the Web. The time scale will be critical to all that we do in this course.

Here are a few general links to paleontological resources to get us started. I will be using the University of California Museum of Paleontology (Berkeley) site often because it is very, very good. Here is their page on "frequently asked questions about paleontology". Another nice Berkeley page is called "learning from the fossil record", with numerous educational and professional articles and links. The Paleontological Research Institution has an excellent site with introductory material (including "mystery fossils" to identify). PaleoNet is "a system of listservers, www pages, and ftp sites designed to enhance electronic communication among paleontologists". It is oriented towards professionals and graduate students, but you can certainly have a go at it. Who knows -- maybe a research paper topic is lurking in there? And I can't let you go without links to my favorite organizations: The Paleontological Society and The Palaeontological Association. You certainly want to look at the projects of Wooster paleontologists over the past few years. (Check out this past summer's work in Israel and Estonia.) You may also want to visit The Paleontology Portal which is "a central entryway to paleontology on the Web". It is an excellent link to thousands of paleontological resources.

As for this week's reading materials, here is an excellent website on fossil preservation from Georgia Perimeter College. You can also look here and here at some pretty pictures of fossils!

Just as an introduction to the fun of paleontology, download one of these CAT-scan movies of a fossil skull, and look at these computer animations of ancient marine life.

Geology in the News:

September 4 & 6

Web Resources for Week #2:

Microfossils are such gorgeous little creatures. The microfossil type collection at the University of California Museum of Paleontology (Berkeley) has some wonderful images available online. The "Diatom Homepage" has lots of information on these intricate organisms. The Micropaleontological Reference Center for the Ocean Drilling Program is a good example of a well-organized site designed to make paleontological data available to anyone who needs or wants it. Berkeley has an excellent page introducing the Foraminifera, our most important microfossil group. Here is a dull but useful page on Neogene to Recent Foraminifera in New Zealand. I like the new Star*Sand Project website with its state-of-the-art taxonomic data-mining search engine for foraminiferans. The Cushman Foundation, publishers of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research, has a good webpage with lots of subsidiary links, as does the benthic foraminiferan website of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Excellent afternoon field trip last week to the Mississippian of the Wooster area. You found superb fossils -- enough to show some very interesting patterns and generate some good questions for future studies in that area. Here are some photographs of our Wooster field trip. This gives you a bit of field experience before our longer field trip on Sunday.

Geology in the News:

September 11 & 13

Web Resources for Week #3:

The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) sites are so good that we might as well concentrate on them for links this week. Start with archaeocyathids (listed as sponges by the Berkeley people but we consider them a separate phylum). This site will take you to all sorts of interesting pages, including systematics, paleoecology and additional images. Fossil sponges (Phylum Porifera) are well described at the UCMP. Examine the pages for the Calcarea, Demospongia, Hexactinellida, stromatoporids, and the mysterious chaetetids. (Do I have a bias in favor of Berkeley? Well, I should.) If you really want to get serious, visit the webpage of the International Association for the Study of Fossil Cnidaria and Porifera. You may also want to see the Fossil Sponges of Kentucky. For that matter, Indiana sponges want equal time! Here is a nice sponge educational page from Cortland. Note the embedded links to images.

Want to see a few movies of sponges? Of course you do! The plots are a little thin, but the scenery is magnificent. And everyone must see the sponge final countdown. Oh yes, you must!

The Sunday field trip was a great success. Check out our new Field Trip Photographs webpage!

Geology in the News:

September 18 & 20

Web Resources for Week #4:

The cnidarians are huge on the Web, as they should be, but your silly textbook has just seven pages! Of course, we must start with the Berkeley pages for the Phylum Cnidaria itself, and then the Hydrozoa, Scyphozoa and Anthozoa. (Note that we are lumping the "Cubozoa" with the Scyphozoa.) Don't miss the page on conulariids. Detailed anatomical images of cnidarians can be found on this biological site. The British Marine Life Study Society (love those Brits) has a wonderful cnidarian page. There is also a page on my favorite hydrozoan, the delightfully-named Velella velella. I love the little jellies photographed here by the good people at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. This computational paleontology site has an astogenetic model for halysitid ("chain coral") growth which is pretty cool. (Check out the computational paleontology main page as well.) The excellent Cnidarian Home Page will certainly provide you links to any cnidarian materials left out by the other sites.

This month's Discover magazine has an excellent article entitled, Do Jellyfish Rule the World? They may indeed, at least the watery part of it. I still think I can keep them out of my house.

Our latest Wikipedia moment: fossil collecting. If you think of more ways to get Wooster geology further embedded in the Wikiworld, let me know!

Geology in the News:

September 25 & 27

Web Resources for Week #5:

You're going to like brachiopods. They are considerably more complex than the cnidarians, they are diverse in both habits and forms, and they are among the most common fossils in your field collections (for which you should definitely bookmark this Dry Dredger's webpage on Cincinnatian brachiopods). As you would expect, the best place to start a study of brachiopods on the Web is with Berkeley's Brachiopod Page. You'll find many pages linked to it, and many images of familiar fossils. You can also find an enormous number of brachiopod images and links on BrachNet, based in France. The Wikipedia webpage on brachiopods is very good and recently updated. (Look carefully at that Wikipage -- Wooster is there!) The enthusiastic Dutch amateur Ron Voskuil has a thorough website on brachiopods as well. And what's this? The famous Dr. Steven Pinker of Harvard has a photo of a brachiopod on the web? I wish he spelled it right, but I'm grateful nonetheless for the attention to paleontology.

You have your first test scheduled for Thursday. Here is a sample test from last year's class. Your test, of course, will be different.

Geology in the News:

October 2 & 4

Web Resources for Week #6:

Bryozoans this week! Everyone's favorite fossils. When I took this course my professor mumbled at the start of this section, "I hate bryozoans. When I find them, and no one's looking, I smash them with my hammer!" Bad form. I hope you learn to love the little critters. They can tell us much about evolution and paleoecology. You can start your browsing with the Bryozoa Home Page. Many links here, including sites on both recent and fossil bryozoans. SUNY Cortland also has a good tutorial on bryozoans. We can also no longer miss the Wikipedia page on bryozoans. You also want to be sure to visit the page of my friend Paul Taylor, who is without a doubt the top paleobryozoologist in the world. Berkeley, of course, has a nice bryozoans page with images, text and links. Here's a page on freshwater bryozoans in the Connecticut River, of all places. Some are huge. How about bryozoans who speak Norwegian? The Bryozoan Fossils of Kentucky page has some specimens you'll find familiar, as will this page of bryozoan specimen images, most without adequate scales (a mistake you will never make). Here is a cool Bryozoa Movies webpage. In the Paleozoic, especially the Ordovician, bryozoans are very common on carbonate hardgrounds.

The Timken Science Library people have an excellent online Guide to Library Research in Science. It is highly recommended for students starting geology research papers!

For research papers in this department (and any other writing, including Independent Study theses), we have adopted a consistent departmental style standard, that stipulated for the journal Geology. You'll find all sorts of helpful details on this Geological Society of America webpage, including links to reference formats for particular types of citations. Your papers will often be longer than submissions to Geology, but you can still follow their guidelines for precision, accuracy and organization.

Geology in the News:

Speaking of geo-engineering gone bad, consider the case of the Three Gorges Dam in China. It has cost untold billions, displaced at least a million people, and is producing a cascade of catastrophes. Geologists predicted this disaster many years ago, but the Chinese government would not be dissuaded. Too bad all around.

October 9 & 11

Web Resources for Week #7:

Catellocaula vallata, the bioclaustration structure I almost showed you on Friday, can be seen on this page of fossils from the amateur Ron Fine. The images are excellent, but they lack scales and these structures are not borings. This starry array is also pictured here and here. We'll talk about this little beauty on Monday, emphasizing what it can tell us about trepostome bryozoans and preservation.

This week we examine the Phylum Mollusca. A wonderful group it is, full of all sorts of tasty creatures. It is always a good idea to check out the "Tree of Life" site at the University of Arizona to see the latest ideas about molluscan evolutionary relationships. A visit to Berkeley's website is usually smart, but their mollusk page has been strangely unfinished for years. When you're serious about mollusks you can join The Malacological Society of London.

There is not much on the polyplacophorans and monoplacophorans. Gastropods, though, have their web fans. One interesting website discusses the poisonous gastropod Conus, its biology, and the medical aspects of its toxins. See how many people have been killed by this vicious snail. ("Vicious snail", you say? Who'd guess we'd use such language!) The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology has a short gastropod section with some good images and text. This course website on gastropods from the University of Rochester is also worth visiting.

Geology in the News:

This may not look like an evolutionary topic, but it is: An immensely strong plastic has been made mimicking the structure of mother-of-pearl (or nacre). Mother of pearl is, of course, the aragonite as made in mollusk shells. It has a cool bricks-and-mortar construction. I gave you a handout this week in class with diagrams of this microstructure.

October 18

Web Resources for Week #8:

This week we look at those magnificent cephalopods. As a preview, check out The Cephalopod Page. It is a joy to read. This website contains numerous links to other equally enthusiastic cephalopod pages. The Tree of Life Project has an excellent page on cephalopods; it concentrates on their systematics, but also has good information on cephalopod biology. We don't want to miss the excitement of the Search for the Giant Squid, which we don't have to if we visit this Smithsonian page. The Smithsonian also has a cephalopod page for professionals and others interested in these creatures. Probably the best cephalopod website for the serious is CephBase, by James B. Wood. There are many pages devoted to fossil cephalopods, such as this one on ammonites of the Fox Hills Formation in north-central North America. I even found a Norwegian page with images of fossil nautiloids. Fossil coleoids are a bit harder to find on the web, but this French page will do. Here is a fun article on "Cretaceous Giant Squid" with cool diagrams.

Geology in the News:

October 23 & 25

Web Resources for Week #9:

Apparently scaphopods and rostroconchs haven't caught on enough in the public consciousness to produce interesting webpages. These are the best I can do.

The best general website I've seen on bivalves is from the Glasgow University Zoology Museum. It has just the right touch of detail and illustration, and it even has little tests to take. The Wikipedia pages on bivalves and oysters are good as well, especially if you look for the Wooster touch on each. Here is a nice webpage with some simple anatomical diagrams of bivalves. Don't miss this site on Ohio's favorite bivalve, the Zebra Mussel. This is a simple index to the common bivalve families, with images which will be helpful in lab. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has some good photographs of deep-sea bivalves and other marine invertebrates.

By the way, if you check out the Wikipedia page on the Carboniferous, you'll see images of some of the fossils you collecting on our field trip to the Wooster outcrop in August. I couldn't put your names on the images because apparently that is considered bad form and I didn't want them to be deleted by some zealous editor. You collected excellent specimens, as you'll see on that page.

Geology in the News:

November 1

Phylum Hyolitha; Evolution of the Mollusks

Web Resources for Week #10:

Only one class lecture this week -- hyoliths and the evolution of mollusks. Hyoliths are mysterious and inconveniently extinct. We are not considering them mollusks here, but an outgroup to which we can compare mollusks for evolutionary purposes. We don't know much about them, as you can see from that pitiful Wikipedia page. The best images I could find are from a blog post on Burgess Shale hyoliths written last year. We have some specimens, though, for your entertainment in lab.

The evolution of mollusks is a much larger story, of course, but there are still few web sources dealing with the topic. The Wikipedia page on molluscan evolution is still pretty sketchy (literally), but there are some useful diagrams here we can use. You will want to meet the odd aplacomorphan mollusks before our lecture. They have virtually no fossil record, but are critical to the evolutionary scenario.

Geology in the News:

November 6 & 8

Web Resources for Week #11:

The Phylum Arthropoda is extraordinarily diverse. These are the animals which will inherit the world, if they haven't already. Let's first visit the wonderful and arthropod-rich Burgess Shale, courtesy of the University of Calgary. For serious work we hardly need to stray from the arthropod pages at Berkeley. (I hope I don't seem too Berkeleycentric, but they really do have the best and most stable paleontology webpages.) I call attention first to the onychophoran page, and then the uniramians and eurypterids. The trilobite pages are especially well organized. Concentrate on the agnostids and the polymerids. An amateur paleontologist (Sam Gon III) has an excellent Guide to the Orders of Trilobites. We will not recognize all the orders, but the images and descriptions here are tremendous. You will also find images of trilobites (and others) on the Utah Fossil Page from the University of Utah. Take a look at this impressive eurypterid from the Mazon Creek Pennsylvanian. (Note the classy use of a penny for scale.) An excellent "eurypteridology" website is maintained by Samuel J. Ciurca, Jr.

Geology in the News:

November 13 & 15

Web Resources for Week #12:

We continue our explorations of the arthropods this week. Please see the links from last week for some general sites. During this last section we will concentrate on crustaceans, insects and arachnids. Here's a great set of fossil insect webpages from the University of Barcelona (fortunately in English!). The Australian Museum has a nice website on spiders, both ancient and modern. Lots of creepy photos there. This place will sell you fossil crustaceans, but they also give you some excellent photographs.

I'm looking forward to seeing your paper drafts in lab this week. Write as much as you can -- the more complete the draft the more advice I can give you. Be sure to follow our departmental writing guidelines in every detail, especially for referencing. Notice that there is a sample research paper (a pdf) from this course.

Thought you guys might like to see this YouTube video on the fossils below the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. They will be very familiar!

Geology in the News:

November 20

Web Resources for Week #13:

The Phylum Echinodermata is now upon us. These organisms could be from Mars if we didn't know better. Two pages make a good start: Berkeley's echinoderm page, and the Echinoderm Homepage at the California Academy of Sciences. There are numerous websites for specific echinoderm groups. The best I've found include ophiuroids, sea urchins, the crown-of-thorns starfish, and the Wikipedia page on crinoids. Also check out this nice page on the Carboniferous Crawfordsville crinoids -- some of the best in the world. This echinoderm webpage by "Zubi" is a lot of fun. Well, OK, some fun. Finally, many echinoids are bioeroders, so I can at last send you to an image of modern echinoids on my bioerosion website.

Geology in the News:

November 27 & 29

Web Resources for Week #14:

Graptolites and conodonts are the last taxonomic groups we cover systematically in this course. You will note that as disparate and strange as they look, they are disturbingly close to us in terms of evolutionary relationships. Our graptolite specimens for the most part look like little black hacksaw blades painted on black shale, so you may appreciate the better images on the Web. Berkeley's "hemichordate" page will give you a general summary of the group and its relatives. A very nice on-line graptolite exhibit has been posted by the Paleontologisk Museum in Norway. An amateur collector has put together a good presentation of Ordovician graptolites from the Athens Shale of Alabama. You can start on the toothy conodonts with the Pander Society homepage. This is the primary professional group of conodont workers. It is named after the original discoverer of conodonts, leading to bad jokes such as calling the head of the organization the "Chief Panderer". The best site I've found for conodont images and discussion is this one by amateur James Davison.

As for trace fossils, let's start with the Wikipedia page on them. (As always, find the Wooster touch!) The Palaeos webpage on trace fossils is good as well. The Virtual Museum of Canada (see? another reason you don't need to actually go to Canada) has a trace fossil website for children. Surprisingly, Berkeley's webpage on trace fossils is not nearly as good as their other paleontological pages. Of course, I have to refer you again to my bioerosion website because these features are also trace fossils in the rock record. Wooster has an excellent collection of hardgrounds, especially from the calcite seas of the Ordovician and Jurassic.

Geology in the News:

Paleontology is the study of ancient life. It is an exciting field at the overlap of geology and biology and animated by the process of organic evolution. My primary goal in this course is that you learn the basic theories and methods of paleontology, and enough of the applications so that you can later pick up a fossil anywhere and know its identity, preservation style, evolutionary history, age, and depositional environment. (Or at least know where and how to look all this up!) Very few (if any) of you will become professional paleontologists, but all of you will confront at various times and in various ways the issues raised in this paleontology course. It could be as a working geologist, a teacher in school, or simply a visitor to a museum. While paleontology is the specific topic, this course is also one in "natural history". Beyond the geological significance and application of fossils, you will learn about the extraordinary adaptations life has made to the diverse environments on Earth. Watching a clam burrow in the sand or a dragonfly winging through the air will never be quite the same after studying the history of life. The single lesson I will expect you to recall five, ten, twenty or fifty years from now is that life is a geological process! The Earth is the way it is because it has harbored life for almost four billion years.

This course is limited to the fossil record of invertebrate organisms, which are informally defined as all life except bacteria, fungi, plants and vertebrates. Invertebrates are the most diverse organisms on Earth and among the most numerous. (I don't know how we count procaryotes.) Their fossils are by far the most useful to geologists, and they present the best record of organic evolution. We will approach the invertebrates systematically, starting with the most "primitive" and "simple" (you will see how those terms are problematic) and ending with the most "complex". The Prothero and Fossils of Ohio textbooks include vertebrates; you are free to read these interesting sections at your leisure, but they do not form part of this course.

Paleontological essays.--Two of these, each 3-4 pages long. Together they count as 10% of your final course grade. One of them will be an analysis of a recent scientific paper (which you will receive in class), and the other will be about a recent paleontological news event. The paper and the news story will be chosen from what appears during the semester of interest to the class, so I cannot give you due dates now. These essays can be revised and submitted again for another grade; your final essay grade will be an average of the two.

Research Paper.--This is a paper covering a topic of your interest in invertebrate paleontology (and not covered in class). It will be roughly 10-15 pages in length, plus illustrations. We will discuss potential topics early in the semester so that you can get started quickly. The paper is scheduled in four assignments: first you turn in a topic and a couple primary references, second is an outline with more references, third is a preliminary draft, and fourth is the final research paper itself. Be sure to use our Departmental Writing Webpage.

Field Studies Report.--Our class field trip will be to the immensely fossiliferous Cincinnati Group of the Upper Ordovician, one of the most famous paleontological localities in the world. It is a one-day trip on Sunday, September 9. You will each study your individual field collections during the semester. The field studies report will be your assessment of your collection, along with paleoenvironmental and paleoecological analyses. We will discuss these collections throughout the lab program.

Lecture Examinations.--Two of them. They will be short-answer essay questions, morphological identifications, and problems to solve. The material will be taken directly from the lectures, but the laboratory exercises will help you understand and digest it.

Laboratory Examinations.--Two of these as well. Each examination will be centered on fossil specimens. You will be asked to identify fossils, discuss their morphological features, and place them in their contexts of environment and time. For each lab test you will be given a list of the taxonomic names of the fossils we have been studying, along with their age ranges. There is thus less direct memorization, but you still must know how the names are applied. The spelling will also improve!

Quizzes.--There are twelve of these, each taking less than ten minutes. They will appear at irregular and (I hope) unpredictable times in lecture and in lab. They are designed to reinforce material we have recently covered. If you are absent for any reason when a quiz is given (other than a scheduled college event), your grade will be recorded as a zero. The lowest two grades (including any zeroes) will be dropped at the end of the semester. In addition, before each lecture you will be given a short list of preparation questions to get you ready for the material. I will occasionally collect your written answers to these questions and count them as a quiz.

Final Examination.--This will be an examination which will cover lecture and laboratory material. Most of this test will be from what we have studied since the last lecture and lab tests, but some of it will be over summary concepts from the whole course. I will expect by then, for example, that you will be able to identify any invertebrate fossil and discuss its paleoenvironmental and paleoecological relationships.

Lab exercises.--Your graded assignments in the lab are the two lab tests, the lecture and lab final examination, and the field studies report. We will, though, have several exercises in the lab over concepts and methods which will be either later tested or will be part of the field studies report. Our projects will include dissections of recently-living invertebrates. We will supply all the necessary tools and, of course, the critters. The systematics pages (the yellow sheets) will be very useful because they will not only serve as a template for your notes, you'll be able to use them on both lab exams and on the final lab-lecture exam.

Prothero, Donald R. 2004. Bringing Fossils to Life. WCB/McGraw-Hill, 503 p. [Readings are listed in the syllabus as "Prothero".]

Feldmann, R.M., and Hackathorn, M. (eds.). 1996. Fossils of Ohio. Ohio Geological Survey, Bulletin 70, 577 pages. [Readings are listed in the syllabus as "FOO".]

I have no Teaching Assistant this year. If you want help beyond what I can provide, we can set up study groups.

Schedule Conflicts

The faculty of the College has recently approved a new policy regarding conflicts between extracurricular and academic events. I agree with it and will simply provide the suggested syllabus statement: "The College of Wooster is an academic institution and its fundamental purpose is to stimulate its students to reach the highest standard of intellectual achievement. As an academic institution with this purpose, the College expects students to give the highest priority to their academic responsibilities. When conflicts arise between academic commitments and complementary programs (including athletic, cultural, educational, and volunteer activities), students, faculty, staff, and administrators all share the responsibility of minimizing and resolving them. As a student you have the responsibility to inform the faculty member of potential conflicts as soon as you are aware of them, and to discuss and work with the faculty member to identify alternative ways to fulfill your academic commitments without sacrificing the academic integrity and rigor of the course."

I have a weekly appointment schedule posted on my office door in Scovel. Please sign up for an appointment if you have any questions about the course format or material.