Teaching – Page 4 – Penny Higgins – Storyteller • Artist • Scientist

Bad Geology Movies: Journey to the Center of the Earth, 2008

The second in a series of posts about what’s wrong in movies with geology-related themes.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

2008

Brendan Fraser

Premise: What if Jules Verne’s story “The Journey to the Center of the Earth” were real?

First things first: This movie clearly was never meant to be scientifically accurate. Once you accept that, it’s actually a fairly fun movie. But if you go into it expecting good science, you’ll be disappointed. What worries me is that there may be people who actually think that the science portrayed in the movie is valid. That’s a problem.

It’s based loosely on the original book by Jules Verne, which was written when nothing was know about the Earth’s interior. I’ve read the book and struggled momentarily to accept that it is the truest kind of fiction and was written with none of the modern knowledge of the Earth.

I accept that this movie (nor the book) are based upon real science. Most everyone knows that the Earth is not hollow, with a habitable cavern near its core. (Well, most anyway.) In the story, there are hypothesized tubes that go past the mantle and into the center of the Earth (this is how our main characters gain access to the big cavern).

The Structure of the Earth

There is absolutely no evidence that such a thing could exist. The Earth is solid, with no air spaces or bubbles (habitable or not) anywhere. Part of the core is liquid (molten), but other than that, the whole thing is solid.

OK, wise guy, you think. How can you possibly know that?

Much of our understanding of the interior of the Earth comes from the recoding and interpretation of seismic waves that pass through the planet. Every time there’s an earthquake on Earth, seismic stations (seismographs) pick up the vibrations kicked off. These vibrations can be used to determine where and when an earthquake happened, and is how the geologists can pinpoint earthquake epicenters and also the magnitude of the quakes.

But the seismic waves set off by an earthquake provide much more information than that. There are several different types of waves that occur due to earthquakes. Some only move on the Earth’s surface. Others only pass through the body of the Earth. Some cannot pass through liquids. A seismograph picks up all of these. By looking at seismograms from several stations and seeing which waves show up, we have been able to determine the structure of the interior of the Earth.

The liquid outer core stops some waves – so we know it’s liquid. All seismic waves pass through the mantle just fine, so we know there’s no pockets of liquid or air in there.

Sorry folks. No cavern in the center of the Earth.

So, here’s some more nit-picky things to think about:

1) Veins of Magnesium. These show up a few times in the movie. For one, I’ve never heard of veins of magnesium. For two, when they’re in the lava tube, trying to light the magnesium, it should go crazy because of all the water present. That it’s wet should help things, not hinder the burning.

2) To find rubies, emeralds, feldspars, and diamonds all in one place like they do is really unlikely. Finding feldspars with any of those gems is not really that surprising, since feldspars com in all sorts of varieties, but the conditions to form the other gems are all different from one another.

And the shape of the raw diamonds are all wrong. They looked like plastic to me – not like diamonds at all. You see, minerals grow in specific shapes. Diamonds form little octahedrons, which was clearly missed by the movie prop people.

What made this gaffe a little worse was that the main character (a geologist) said that these minerals and gemstones are common in volcanic tubes. Clearly, this is just a line for the movie (although diamonds can be found sometimes where there have been explosive, deep eruptions called kimberlites).

3) Muscovite is a mineral, not a “thin type of rock formation.” Muscovite is a very important rock-forming mineral. It doesn’t tend to form platforms with open chasms below. The comment that changes in pressure can cause muscovite to shatter is also not true. So as a mineral, they’ve got muscovite wrong. As a plot device, it’s pretty interesting.

4) When the main character tells everyone that those cute little bio-luminescent birds have been extinct on the Earth’s surface for 150 million years, I cringed. There were no modern birds 150 million years ago, only some archaic birds and some dinosaurs. Maybe I’ll just give him the benefit of the doubt that he meant 50 million years. That I could accept (though it’s probably still far-fetched!).

5) The discussion of how magnetic polarity is reversed at the core was kind of strange. I would expect that a compass would be useless near the core only because you’re right next to where the magnetic field is being generated, but that a compass should point South instead of North isn’t right.

6) Speaking of magnetism, how about those floating magnetic rocks? If the magnetic field is strong enough to make the rocks float, I would have expected that the kid’s metal gear would also float, and probably the kid as well. This scene just bugged me as being completely impossible, even when I accepted that the movie is purely fiction. I was even ok with the muscovite problem much more than this.

7) Since I am a paleontologist, I do feel obligated to point out that the dinosaur skull that they used as a raft/sled is all wrong. What they’ve done is combined a dinosaur skull (which is full of holes) with a mammal skull (that has fewer holes), left out all the important openings in the bottom of the skull, and called it a raft.

8) Back to the whole magnesium thing. When they’re stuck in the skull and trying to light the magnesium so that it’ll break the walls and release the water on the other side, which would then fall on the magma and make steam and shoot them out of the lava tube. Well, a) would not the heat from the lava have lit the magnesium? b) there’s no way there’s water on the other side a a lava tube just waiting to get out. Besides, c) the water should have made the magnesium ignite better with the lava in the first place. And, d) wait, how is this magnesium even there (or the water) if they’re stuck in a lava tube that’s had lava in it? This one made me facepalm.

Anyway, the movie was an enjoyable romp, provided one realizes from the very beginning that the ‘science’ portrayed is very much fiction. The highlight for this movie was when, 3/4 of the way through, my 8-year-old son turned to me and asked me if it was real. I assured him that it was not. He seemed relieved.

What have I taught someone to do?

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – Do you enjoy teaching others? Talk about a time you taught someone how to do something.

—

It should be obvious from some of my blog posts (here and here) that I truly adore teaching. I love any form of teaching, from the formal class room, to putting up a table at a career fair, to preparing talks for senior citizens at retirement communities. I love it all.

For all the teaching that I’ve done, it’s tough to narrow down this topic to just one time I taught someone how to do something. The specific phrase “how to do something” means that there was some actual step-by-step training involved. It’s not just teaching someone to distinguish between igneous and metamorphic rocks, for example, as you might in a traditional lecture-style class. The prompt is asking about something that was perhaps a bit more involved.

One of the things I get to teach (though I use the term ‘train’ in this case) regularly is how to run analyses on the mass spectrometer. Every graduate student who’s going to run more than a couple dozen samples in our lab goes through this training, so they can run their own samples (on evenings and weekends) and I can focus on contract work (to keep the lab running).

This is not without great trials and tribulations. It’s nice to have students run their own samples. It saves me a lot of time. But running a mass spectrometer is complex. A good student will be able to gain the skills they need to independently run the mass spectrometer in about four days (or four sets of analyses). The first day, they watch me and take copious notes. The second and third days, they do everything, with me observing directly. On the fourth day, I let them do everything when I’m not in the room, but I come in and check things in between steps. If they’ve gotten most of everything right (and haven’t done anything wrong that would compromise the mass spectrometer), then I give them permission to run analyses whenever they want.

This process can be insanely time consuming. I need about four hours to get a set of analyses going. When I have to train someone, there goes the whole day. And it’s terrifying too. One wrong push of a button and BAMMO! I’ve got to replace $1000 worth of parts. Usually, the training period goes through the “Day 4” step for several analysis days. “Day 1” is also often repeated.

Occasionally, I have students that really struggle with all of it. There really is a ton to remember. It’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly. And hopping on one foot. Even more rarely, I have a student who just ‘gets’ it immediately. That’s always a little disconcerting, because it makes me wonder what I left out.

And it doesn’t matter whether the trainee is a undergraduate student, a graduate student, or a post-doctoral researcher. That has nothing to do with who’s going to have the most success. I do find that most undergraduates are general so afraid to break anything that they follow my instructions to a T (which is good). Postdocs also tend to follow my instructions carefully, I think that’s because they have enough experience with breaking things by then that they also take my word as law. Grad students tend to be a mixed bag. The mix of low (or no) experience and high confidence (having survived an undergraduate degree) can result in them ‘trying’ things that they shouldn’t do. Or hesitating when they don’t need to.

By now, I’ve gone through this process so many times, they’ve all blurred together. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing I’ve trained so many students. By providing them this skill, they have something to market as they’re moving forward with their lives. And though it’s highly unlikely that whatever future job they have will entail using the exact same instrument for the exact same purpose, just knowing what is involved with such analyses and that they can do it should give them some confidence and a step up above students that might not have been provided the same opportunity.

For 12-5-12

The journey toward swordsman begins…

I don’t know about you-all, but I had a pretty awesome day today. Today I ‘officially’ took the first step my journey toward mastery of the Western Martial Arts, that is the ‘Knightly Arts of Battle.’ Naturally, there’s a ton to learn, and if I can master it in my lifetime (or even have a good grip on it in the next ten years), I think I’ll be doing pretty good.

In an earlier post, I discussed my journey to get to this point. Today, I took the long drive to Ithaca, NY from my home (about 2 hours, one way), for 2.5 hours of classical fencing training. The first two hours were two, one-hour foil classes that are offered by the Classical Fencing School, In Ferro Veritas. After that, I receive 20-30 minutes of individual instruction from Adam Crown, Maître d’Armes. The individual training will ultimately focus on the use of the small sword, but for today it focused on footwork, which makes sense as I explain below.

It’s a pretty heavy workout for one day, but it makes the long drive worthwhile. Plus, I can’t make that trip every weekend, so it makes sense to pack in as much as I can whenever I can make the trip.

One might think that to learn swordplay, one would be holding a sword much of the time. But that’s not how it works at all. You see, what I’m learning is a martial art, not just let’s-go-out-and-bash-on-each-other games. Like any art, one must learn the foundations first. Of those 2.5 hours of practice today, I held a practice foil for about half an hour – and that wasn’t during the individual training. Almost the entirety of the other two hours were spend focused on footwork. Because without a strong foundation, whatever you do with the sword is wasted.

It’s not just having a good stance, although it is important to get your legs to bend in those strange, unnatural ways, and to have them do that automatically. You’ve got to be able to move around, remain balanced, stay out of the way of your opponent’s weapon, and be in a position to perform any number of actions with which you hope to defeat your opponent.

So there’s the en garde position, wherein you’re standing still, poised to move.

There’s advancing and retreating. Sound’s simple enough. It ain’t. Just trust me on this one.

Then thrust and lunge. All right. Isn’t this the quintessential fencing position?

Then there’s all the other stuff that I’m currently racking my brain to remember, and of course the names of them all are *poof* gone from my memory.

Lunge, back off, then lunge again. Lunge, then sneak a step forward while still lunging. That’ll get ‘em!

There’s that dodge to the one side. Oh, and now the dodge to the other side. Ooh! How about advancing with the other leg? Wait, what? I can’t bend like that, can I?

Oh yeah, and it all has to be fluid and you’ve got to keep your head up, your shoulders down, your back straight and you hips tucked. And where are your feet? Yeah, don’t forget about those. Now go! Fast! Ok, you can slow down now. Go!Go!Go! Slow down.

Ah, well, suffice it to say, I’m tired now. But excited too. Next lesson in two weeks! I can’t wait.

Field Methods -or- Rock-breaking 101

I’ve only just become aware “The Accretionary Wedge,” a geological blog carnival! It’s basically a monthly amalgamation of the thoughts of geoscientists world wide in reference to an earth-science related prompt.

What a fun concept.

This month, the prompt was for ‘dream geology classes.’ You know, the ones you really wish were offered back in your undergrad days. There are a few that I’ve always wished were taught, some of which I see are already touched upon in the responses to the call for posts. I’ll just talk about one.

FIELD METHODS -or- Rock-breaking 101

One class that I’ve noticed is sorely missing from almost all geology programs is a “Field Methods” class. It could be that the geosciences are heading more and more into the laboratory or onto computers, but it seems that field geology is suffering. A person can actually get a degree in the earth sciences without doing more than a day or two of field work ever!

*gasp*

I was fortunate that where I did my undergraduate (Fort Lewis College), they actually offered a one-semester field methods class. This wasn’t field camp, that was different. This was a full semester course on how to read maps and use compasses. It taught you haw to take notes and how to deal with the geologist’s ‘laboratory,’ where it could rain on you while you’re working. It was ‘field-camp-mini,’ but it put those of us who later took a formal field camp (also offered by my school) at a huge advantage over our less-skilled classmates. (I’m glad to see that Fort Lewis still offers the field methods class, though it looks like field camp might have gone by the wayside.)

I loved that class. I learned in that class that I had what I needed to become a real geoscientist.

The only thing that the class lacked that I wished were in there was specific training on how to collect a hand sample. Seriously, I wanted to learn how to break a rock with a hammer. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. There’s a finesse – a certain amount of skill – needed to break off the perfect chunk of rock, completely dependent upon the equipment you have and the type of rock. A two-hour lab exercise would have been effective to teach that.

That’s the class I think needs to be offered in every department at every school. I know I benefited greatly from having it, and I’m certain that students of the geosciences would benefit as well.

The Joys of Teaching

There are those who think I have a little too much fun while I’m teaching. These complaints typically come from students who think that college-level teaching has to be the ivory-tower-residing professor standing at the front of the classroom authoritatively spouting facts that the students are to dutifully write down and memorize for exams. College instructors are not to laugh or use colloquialisms. Professors must not be human.

Well, for that one percent of students: I’m sorry. You won’t like my class.

For the rest of you, let me preview your experience if you decide to take one of my classes.

I definitely do the standard spouting of information, as professorial-types are supposed to. I enjoy spouting information and drawing simultaneously. I was particularly proud of my artwork the day I described surface and deep currents in the ocean:

Chalkboard masterpiece: Ocean circulation patterns.

Sometimes I get a little silly, like when I used the table-top as a chalk-board and used a bunch of my son’s toys to illustrate the relationships of the major dinosaur groups:

dino phylogeny — Dinosaur phylogeny with toys and chalk

I think one of my teaching coups was when I devised the hypothetical continent of ‘Cupcakeia’ to help students understand the motions of tectonic plates and the importance of apparent polar wander. (You’ll need to take my class or do a little research to find out what that is.) It got better when I added the sub-continent of ‘Frosteringia,’ that collides with Cupcakeia to make a nice mountain range. So proud of that. Even prouder when my students use Cupcakeia as an example on their exams. (**See, they know it’s fake. It has to be. But they have a chuckle and they REMEMBER! Gasp! They learn! Woot!**) I wish I had a photo or drawing of Cupcakeia and Frosteringia. Maybe next year.

There are definitely the days when I’m as grumpy as the students are about being in class so freaking early. Those are the days when we really have fun. The other day I was trying to make the simple point that when ice floats in water, part of it (the root, if you will) is under water. I could have done that professorially in less than a minute. I think I spent at least five minutes drawing a picture that included a humpback whale, the Titanic (which upset the students), a lost polar bear, and a very large manatee, about which I wrote “Oh! The huge manatee!”

Oh the huge manatee — Oh! The huge manatee! (Photo by my student @parroyo9 on Twitter)

Yeah. I lost the class for a while that day. But hey, in the end, no one regretted coming to class. So yay! Success.

My most recent lecture involved the invention of new terms: Oosh and Schlorque. Ooshing was a term invented by one student as an alternative to “ridge push.” I like ooshing much better. Schlorque was invented by another student as an alternative to “slab pull.” My students dutifully photographed this and posted it on Twitter so that I wouldn’t forget.

ooshNschlorque — Definitions of Oosh and Schlorque. The spelling of schlorque was selected because it makes it seem more sophisticated. (Photo by my student @parroyo9 on Twitter)

Like I said, there are those who might think I goof off a little too much in my classes. But, you know, I have a good rapport with my students, and I typically have 30-35 students (of a class of 43) who actually show up for lecture every day. Any attendance greater than 50% for an introductory course is really darn good.

I think they like the class. I sure like teaching it.

Social Media and the New Classroom

I’ve been teaching here at the University of Rochester for about five years now, at first only one class a year, but for the last three years at least one course every semester. It keeps me busy, but I like it because I get to interact with students in the department. I feel more like a member of the department rather than merely a laboratory grunt, which is what I’d pretty-much be otherwise. Plus, I get to teach, which is something I have always wanted to do.

I love teaching. I love sharing what I know, and my enthusiasm for that knowledge, with anyone willing to listen. This is why I almost never turn down an opportunity to give a talk to any old group that’s interested. The downside to teaching, of course, is that I have to actually assign grades, which stinks, but these are people’s careers we’re talking about. Assessment is necessary.

One of the problems I face as both an instructor and a laboratory manager (and, really, any faculty member has this problem) is making myself available to my students outside of the classroom for whatever matters they might want to discuss. I have office hours, of course, but in the five years I’ve been teaching, I think I’ve seen students actually use my office hours twice a semester. Part of the problem is that students have other classes. They can’t make my office hours. The other part of the problem is that, unless there is a student actually in my office, I’m usually in the lab, doing science-y things. Most of the time, students just e-mail me and that works OK.

This year I’ve decided to try something different. In the spring, I went to a two-day conference supported by The Rochester Institute of Technology’s Faculty Institute on Teaching and Learning. There were many options for sessions to attend, but for whatever reason, I was drawn to those focusing on social media.

It seems that social media, like Twitter, are getting a lot of mileage in some professions, and are beginning to be used in courses training students for those professions. Typically, these programs are in journalism or political science, not in the ‘hard’ sciences like geology. Twitter especially, has been used effectively as a teaching and communication tool. I was impressed.

I recalled that I once used Facebook in my classes, but that had problems, not least of which was that not everyone was on Facebook (or wanted to be). I gave up on that pretty quickly. But Twitter is another beast altogether. I decided to try out Twitter for my introductory geology class this fall. I came up with a hashtag (#UREES101) which students could use to post questions about their materials. Students could troll that hashtag and watch without even signing up for Twitter. Alternatively they could engage in discussions without having to ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ anyone. I thought using Twitter would enable two things: 1) Students could communicate with me whenever they needed to, even if they couldn’t make my office hours or if they weren’t comfortable asking questions in class; 2) Students would also learn how to be succinct in their questions and answers – a skill notably lacking for a lot of people.

While I still have office hours (that no one still comes to), I also have set Twitter hours, late in the evening, when students know that I’ll be on-line and they can use the hashtag and tweet their questions. My colleagues expressed skepticism that this could ever work. But it has, and much better than I anticipated!

I have interacted more with my students this year than in all the other years past combined. Students ‘come’ to Twitter hours with their questions, and though usually only one or two are talking, other students tell me that they do look and watch. Other things have come out of this, too. Students are answering each other’s questions. They are discussing things! And sometimes their discussions include geological colleagues outside of this class or even this continent.

I’ll pose questions on Twitter for students to struggle with. These are usually things that have been problematic in years past that I want them to think a bit more about. I’ve had people from all over the world explain these things – like strike and dip – in ways that I couldn’t. I think the students benefit from someone else’s explanation.

All-in-all, I am excited about how social media is enhancing my classroom. Yeah, I’m ‘on call’ a bit more often, but that’s OK. It lets me do what I want to do: teach. Students have questions, I (or someone else) answer them, students move on rather than struggling for a while and giving up. It’s win-win. It’s easy. It’s free.

Textbook for Paleontology

Well, I’m already a week and a half late in submitting my book order for next semester’s Principles of Paleontology class. I’m late this year because I’m considering changing textbooks.

Here’s a selection of the books I have to choose from:

Paleobooks — A selection of books available for use in teaching an introductory paleontology course.

No two of these books are the same, and what your preference is really depends upon how you might teach the course. There are two general ways with which an introductory paleontology class is taught.

1) Taxonomically. In this case the focus of the class is more biological than geological, and vast amounts of time are spent discussing each group of fossils, usually focusing on the invertebrates (those lacking backbones) because they are far more abundant, and useful, than the vertebrates (animals with backbones.) My first paleontology class was like that and I loved every minute of it. I used an earlier edition of Clarkson’s book (the upper right book in the photo) back then. Such a class is very helpful for students who might need to work out which species lived where and when.

2) Methods and Principles. Here, the focus would be on the mechanics of doing paleontology, with little focus on the individual fossil groups. Here, students would learn about evolutionary rates and rarefaction and lots about geology, with little biological input. This sort of class teaches the skills that students would need to effectively do paleontology irrespective of their favorite fossil groups – which is good when they might wind up studying anything later in their careers. Foote and Miller (in the lower right) is really great for this.

When I first taught EES 207 (which was then called Invertebrate Paleontology), I immediately used the latest edition of Clarkson’s book and taught the class just like I had learned it. But I realized after completing the class, that I had left the students with a great knowledge of what the fossils were, but with no skills on how to work with them. I realized that because my paleontology class had been taught the same way, that I had started graduate school with basically no concept of how paleontology was really done. I decided I needed to re-vamp the class.

I changed the name of the class to Principles of Paleontology and decided to focus on how paleontology was done moreso than on the different fossil groups. I switched to the Foote and Miller book. But I knew that what students want out of such a class – and what I my self would expect – would be at least some knowledge of the fossil groups, So I arranged the class with a formal lecture two days a week, and then what I called ‘Fun Friday’ where students would explore one of the major fossil groups. My hope was that out of such a class, students would leave with a working knowledge of the major fossil groups and that they could actually do paleontology. The problem with Foote and Miller as a text is that it offers absolutely nothing in terms of description of the fossil groups. I tried adding optional texts (like “Fossils at a Glance” by Milsom and Rigby), but no one would buy them. I wound up preparing all manner of supplementary materials for the students for each of the major groups of fossils. This has been a pain.

This coming semester, I’m faced with a new problem. My class is going to be huge, with 24 students, so ‘Fun Friday’ as it has been in the past is going to have to change. Suddenly, I wish there was a lab section to go with the class. Maybe that will arise next time I teach the course. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it, put supplementary packets are definitely not an option.

One thing is for sure: I need a book that covers the mechanics of paleontology as well as the important fossil groups. Two books that do this are the “Bringing Fossils to Life” by Prothero and “Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record” by Benton and Harper. One or the other of these books are going to be my choice for the coming semester. I’ve been informally asking my colleagues which book they prefer, and so far the overwhelming preference is for the Benton and Harper book, so I’m leaning that way. It seems to be a good balance of readability, mechanics, and taxonomy that I’m looking for. The Benton and Harper book is relatively new to me, so I have to think about it more. I have had a copy of the Prothero book for a while, and decided against using it because it didn’t quite cover all the topics I wanted to cover in the detail that I’d like, though it could still be workable. Benton and Harper looks pretty promising, though I’ve only flipped through it a bit.

I need to make a decision in the next few days (since the book order forms were due nearly two weeks ago). Does anyone else have an opinion?

New Semester, Giant Class

It’s that crazy time of the semester when your classes are pounding you and you’re stretched to the extreme, and then suddenly it’s time to register for next semester. “Hey!” you cry. “Let me survive THIS semester first!”

I usually know nothing of it until I start getting the e-mails that all say: Dear Professor, I haven’t had the prerequisites. Can I take your class anyway? Students are drawn to my classes because they have the word “Paleontology” in them. Ooh! Dinosaurs! I’m sure that’s what they’re thinking. They’re wrong, of course.

Nevertheless, it has been my general policy to allow students to take my classes without the prerequisites if they have the nerve to ask. The prerequisites are there mostly to keep the drooling dino-philes out of my classes, and to insure that the students in the class are capable of handing an upper-division course. (Don’t get me wrong. The dino-obsessed often morph into excellent paleontologists, and dinosaurs are cool. The drooling students, though, often need some time to mature before I want them in my class, that’s all!) I teach introductory geology and I know there are students in that class ill-prepared for my paleontology classes.

This year has been unique, now that the registration process is well underway. I’ve always had a few students come to me asking if my Earth and Environmental Science course could be used as an elective for their Biology degree. It requires a petition, but this has always been allowed: paleontology is very interdisciplinary and is as much biology as it is geology. This year, the Biology department officially listed my class as an elective for its majors.

The enrollment has jumped dramatically. I actually had to put a cap on the class when I realized that there were more students registered than ever before and the sophomores and freshmen hadn’t even registered yet. How much of that is because of the Biology Department’s endorsement of the course is not clear. It could also be that it’s been two years (because it has), so there’s a plethora of students that have been waiting. I have been teaching the introductory geology class for the past few years. Maybe these are students who enjoyed that class and want to have another one from me (the fools!). It’s also true that the university has been growing its student population, but I don’t think it’s by that much.

I’m not sure. But what I do know is that with the class as large as it is now, I’m going to have to re-vamp a lot of my exercises! They worked great for classes smaller than ten students, and did OK for a class of fifteen, but now I’ve got 24. Now it’s suddenly a formal lecture-style class and I’m regretting that I don’t have a laboratory section (which I’ve never had before).

So, it’s exciting that my class is suddenly so big. It’s popular, and maybe a gateway for students to join the EES degree program. But it’s horrifying too, because now I’ve got to re-think all my lectures and exercises. (And just for entertainment, I *might* change textbooks this year, too.)

I’ll let you know how it works out!

Why I do what I do: Education, one victory at a time.

I had a great experience the other day – the kind of experience that all educators want. I converted someone.

I didn’t know if they needed or wanted conversion, but they were skeptical of what I was presenting. And I – entirely unwittingly – provided that bit of information that converted them from ‘skeptic’ to ‘believer.’

A fair question to ask at this point is, “What didn’t they believe in?” We’ll get there.

I had been invited to give a talk/presentation on the nebulous topic of ‘dinosaurs.’ The group that invited me had recently had a lively discussion about dinosaurs, but found that they still had questions for which no Google search provided adequate answers. So there I was.

I was a little trepidatious, because, despite the fact that I am a ‘vertebrate paleontologist,’ I really don’t know a whole lot about dinosaurs. There are thousands of 9-year-olds who know more about dinosaurs than I do. Mammals are my thing. But they sent me a list of questions, and I realized that I could address most of them easily. Most had less to do with dinosaurs than they did about the science of paleontology.

As it happened, the group was a delight. We had a fabulous time talking about how the turkey you eat at Thanksgiving really is a dinosaur. We talked about how bones and teeth were made of minerals (essentially rocks) and that’s why they don’t rot (and why they’re preserved as fossils). We talked about what was wrong with Jurassic Park. We talked a bit on how we name, and how we recognize, new species, and about some of the ‘mistakes’ paleontologists have made along the way. We talked about tracks and pseudofossils. Really, there were few topics in paleontology that we didn’t cover, and it was only an hour-and-a-half presentation.

With about 15 minutes to go, the skeptic was revealed (paraphrased):

‘If humans and dinosaurs never co-existed – so humans never saw dinosaurs – how do we know that dinosaurs are real? How do we know that they ever really existed?’

From how the question was asked, I could tell that our skeptic was genuinely curious – not intent on discrediting me or the science, but honestly confused. And as I listened, I was frankly boggled by where the confusion was.

You see, I’ve been at this so long that the reasons why we know that dinosaurs existed seem so self-evident, I don’t understand how people don’t see them. However, one thing I have learned in recent years while teaching introductory geology courses: It is impossible to remember what you didn’t know before you started your studies. That is to say, I don’t remember not knowing how we determine relative ages of rocks. I don’t remember not knowing that rocks exposed on the surface are of all different ages. I finally realized that our skeptic didn’t know these things any more than I did 20+ years ago. I also realized that the answer our skeptic wanted didn’t come from paleontology, but from geology. No wonder Google wasn’t being helpful.

So I stepped back and described Hutton’s original observation of the unconformities in Scotland and how this helps us understand of the depth of geological time. Then I explained how some basic principles (original horizontality, superposition, cross-cutting relationships) can help us put rocks in the correct chronological order. Then I drew a stack of rocks and showed that humans were at the top of the stack and dinosaurs were at the bottom.

And the skeptic’s eyes opened wide. ‘I get it! There were dinosaurs!’

Others in the room were delighted. They’d been trying to ‘prove’ the existence of dinosaurs to the skeptic for a while, and here I had done it with two drawings in five minutes.

I was never my intention to go in there and ‘convert’ anyone. (In fact, I hesitate to use the term ‘convert,’ only that the term was being tossed around by everyone in the room when the presentation was done, including by the skeptic.) I was simply there to answer people’s questions about dinosaurs. I don’t care what they believe about evolution or the age of the earth or anything. I was there to be a better database than the world wide web. I think they got the answers that they wanted, and then some.

And I got that fantastic satisfaction that we all yearn for as educators: Somebody learned something – something that may well alter their world view – and thanked me for it.

Oh, yeaaaaah!

The Snouters and Teaching Cladistics

A new species of Rhinograde mammal, Nasoperforator bouffoni, was described last week by a group of researchers at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, in Paris. This is really exiting news in science, as we often (falsely) think that we’ve found and named all the living mammals that there are.

The Rhinogrades (or more affectionately, the Snouters) were originally described in the book, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, by Harald Stümpke. The Rhinogrades are a new order of mammals known only from the island Hy-dud-dye-fee in the South Sea archipelago of Hi-yi-yi. They are noted for the incredible adaptations of their noses for locomotion and feeding.

Stümpke proposes a family tree of the Order Rhinogradentia based upon 26 genera of Snouters described in the book. This sort of family tree, more properly called a ‘phylogram,’ is typically based upon a person’s gut feeling about the similarities among different species. It can be based upon a researcher’s experience and can be biased by a scientist’s pre-conceived notions about how things ought to be related. A better, more objective, way to approach relationships among different species is to use cladistic analysis (or cladistics).

Snouter Phylogram — Stümpke's phylogram of the Snouters

If you’re remotely interested in paleontology, then you’ve probably heard of cladistics (or cladograms, or clades). Cladistics is one of those things in the science of paleontology that you have to know about. Some folks spend their entire careers focused on cladistic analysis. Others avoid cladistics vehemently. Nevertheless, there’s no escaping cladistics. If you want to know paleontology, you gotta know cladistics.

So then, what is cladistics if it’s so important? For me, it’s a topic that I took a full semester course on as a graduate student. My notes are in a binder labeled ‘sadistics,’ which goes a long way to describe just how I feel about cladistics. (I actually have two binders labeled ‘sadistics.’ The other one is for a class in which I learned about t-tests, f-tests, means, and standard deviations.)

But seriously, cladistics is a tool by which paleontologists (and biologists and botanists and geneticists) can mathematically determine the ‘relatedness’ of organisms. More generally, cladistics is used to determine evolutionary relationships, so we can determine who evolved from whom. It’s mathematical, and thus reproducible and computerizable, and comes replete with all sorts of statistics (the other sadistics) that can be used to support or refute proposed evolutionary pathways.

Fine.

But it’s also a bit of a nightmare.

The analysis starts by breaking a species down into a bunch of ‘characters’ for which there are, in the purest cladistics, only two states. The states for each character are entered as 0’s and 1’s in a matrix. Examples of well-behaved characters are:

Character	Character state ‘0’	Character state ‘1’
Antorbital Fenestra (a skull opening seen in some dinosaurs)	Absent	Present
Palatine teeth (having teeth on the roof of the mouth)	Present	Absent

Presence and absence characters are great. Unfortunately, not all characters can be broken easily into 0’s and 1’s.

Character	Character state ‘0’	Character state ‘1’	Character state ‘2’
Eye color	Blue	Brown	Hazel
Femur length (the thigh bone)	0-10 inches	12-18 inches	20-19 inches

And sometimes, characters obvious in several species are not known from others. For example, eye color is meaningless when considering eye-less animals, but if only one species in your analysis lacks eyes, then you need that character information for the other species. Another problem occurs when (especially in paleontology) an organism is only incompletely known. For example, toe characteristics aren’t helpful when one of the animals in your study is known only from its skull.

In principle, however, one needs only determine all the character states for a suite of characters for each organism in an analysis.

Organism	Character 1 (hooves)	Character 2 (hair)	Character 3 (warm-blooded)	Character 4 (bones)	Character 5 (scales)	Character 6 (4-chambered heart)
Horse	1 (has)	1 (has)	1 (has)	1 (has)	0 (doesn’t have)	1 (has)
Cow	1 (has)	1 (has)	1 (has)	1 (has)	0 (doesn’t have)	1 (has)
Trout	0 (doesn’t have)	0 (doesn’t have)	0 (doesn’t have)	1 (has)	1 (has)	0 (doesn’t have)
Croco-stimpy	0 (doesn’t have)	0 (doesn’t have)	0 (doesn’t have)	1 (has)	1 (has)	1 (has)

And then you use all the 1’s and 0’s to determine who’s most similar to (and thus more related to) whom. In the above case, if we look only at characters 1-5, one can see that horses and cows are very similar and related to each other, as are trout and croco-stimpies. But add character 6, and you can see that croco-stimpies are more similar to horses and cows than to trout, thus, one could infer that trout evolved into croco-stimpies which then evolved into horses and cows.

You’ve already got a headache, and it hasn’t even gotten complicated yet.

Enter the Rhinogrades.

For years, I’ve been handing my students copies of Stümpke’s book, and asking them to do a cladistic analysis of nine species (of their choice) of Snouters. Next time I’ll have them include the new species. The problem is that the students have to come up with their own characters and character states. Students quickly realize how important it is to choose good characters (and character states), and how difficult it can be to determine character states when all they have is an incomplete description of an organism. So, it’s actually a really great exercise (even if the students claim to hate it). The students turn in a cladogram and a list of characters and character states, and I compare their cladogram with the one I’ve devised based off of Stümpke’s family tree.

Snouter Cladogram — My Snouter cladogram - based only on Stümpke's phylogram

And when they’re all done, then I tell them.

It’s a hoax. There’s no Hi-Yi-Yi. No Nasoperforator. But it was fun, wasn’t it?