Detailed Course Information |
Spring 2011
May 04,2024 |
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| GEOL 201 - DINOSAURS |
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This is an interdisciplinary course in which students will investigate dinosaurs in their geologic and ecological contexts. Students will begin with an introduction to aspects of geology required for dinosaur studies: geologic time, plate tectonics (including the historical development of this unifying theory), and sedimentary rocks and their depositional environments, culminating in an overview of Mesozoic climate. Taphonomy--the study of the post-mortem history of an organism--will also be introduced. Following this will be an examination of evolutionary theory (including its historical development), which will tie back to geologic time, in order to understand how dinosaurs change through time. Students will also gain an overview of cladistics or phylogenetic systematics, the study of classifying organisms and determining their relationships to each other. After a brief overview of the history of vertebrate life in pre-dinosaurian times, the bulk of the course will be devoted to the study of dinosaurs (including birds): their anatomy, relationships, and geographic distribution in a plate tectonic framework. These dinosaurian studies will be presented in a temporal order, from oldest to youngest, and classic faunas will be examined. Finally, we will examine aspects of dinosaur biology (including evidence of warm-bloodedness, feathers, and social behavior), the causes of the extinction of the non-avian lineages at the end of the Cretaceous, and an overview of the perception of dinosaurs in the media since the mid-1800's.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Environmental Studies Department Course Attributes: OLD GE TOPICS SCIENCE Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Undergraduate |
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