Paleontology and Fossils in the news

Paleontology has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance from the heyday 100 years ago beginning more recently with the movie, -Jurassic Park’. Interest in fossils, (especially dinosaurs!), has never been as high as it is today. Almost monthly there are reports of a new dinosaur discovered in China, a new bird fossil, a missing link in the evolution of whales etc. In addition, federal and state and even local governments have in the past generation enacted guidelines, rules, and laws to protect and preserve fossils on federal and state lands as a natural, nonrenewable resource. This exercise calls to attention the media response to these issues in addition to driving home the fact that fossils are far more common than the public imagines.

Task-
For the duration of the course, the student will make a “scrapbook” of any news articles on paleontology, origin of life, fossils, etc. Sources for this scrapbook will be online newspapers, news magazines (Time, Newsweek, etc) or other online news items or press releases. It is expected that the student will collect at a minimum between 12 to 24 articles. Students will write a short, two to three page summary of the thrust of the articles. (not one summary for each article, but a single summary of all of the articles). eg., Are most of the articles on dinosaurs? The use of fossils in Geology? Major new discovery of fossils?, etc. The news articles are to be put into a “references” tile (Word doc or pdf) and submitted online by the deadline.

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