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.
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.
This lesson requires students to do a report on distinct scientific fields using Shape of Life videos, Internet resources and a handout about “Cool Science Careers."
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.
