MS-LS4.A Evidence of Common Ancestry and Diversity

Students will explore an animated "Tree of Life." They will record observations and questions about it and discuss them as a class. Create your own cartoon!

Students explore the evolution of life on earth by constructing a "tree of life" -- metaphorical art that arranges groups of organisms by characteristics and when scientists think they first evolved.

For more BIG FUN, take a look at the new Animating Tree of Life Lesson Plan where students create their own cartoon!

In this lesson students make connections between fossils and modern day organisms. Using the information about the Cambrian Explosion, they explore theories about how and why organisms diversified. Students hypothesize what evidence might be helpful to connect fossil organisms to modern organisms to show evolutionary connections. Students use three videos from shapeoflife.org.

In this lesson students engage in the practice of science by observing behaviors using Shape of Life videos with the audio and closed captioning turned off.

Through a sequence of “explore-before-explain” laboratory investigations, coupled with segments from the Shape of Life videos, students study molluscs in the present and their long  evolutionary history. The module includes those listed below, which can also stand alone.

Students explore the diversity and adaptations of marine arthropods through short videos and student centered activities.

This lesson begins with students engaging in the practice of science -- observing the phenomena, describing their observations, and making sense of what they see. They observe annelid behaviors using a Shape of Life video with the audio turned off. They try to figure out what the phenomenon (the behavior) is, how it might help the organism survive, and how it might impact the environment. Working with a partner, they make hypotheses about what they are observing and organisms' adaptions that allow it to perform the behavior.

In this hands-on activity, students study the beautiful shells not as objects of beauty but as artifacts born of an evolutionary arms race.

Lab dissection of a representative of Class Bivalvia. Supported by several Shape of Life segments, students interpret bivalve adaptations as a radical case of divergent evolution: A simple ancestral snail with a mobile lifestyle, single dome-shaped shell, bilateral symmetry, and a head (“cephalization”) transformed into a headless, double-shelled, sedentary filter-feeder whose bilateral form is obscure.

The paleontological evidence of the first animal to hunt is tiny trails that have been fossilized in rocks. To start this lesson, students will consider the tracks and traces left by modern animals and what they can learn about an animal from its tracks.

Students explore the evolution of the phylum Chordata by constructing a "family tree" - a diagram of evolutionary traits and animals.

In this lesson students make a guess as to what was the first animal. The class watches the Sponge video from the shapeoflife.org and writes down what evidence they saw that sponges were the first animals. Then the class discusses what evidence they need to figure out what might have been the first animal. They watch the scientist video “Mitchell Sogin, Evolutionary Biologist: Proof of the First Animal” and write down the evidence that is presented for the sponge being the first animal.