Paleo 200: Student Signup

Course Description and other Information

Paleontology 200, Dinosaurs in the Fossil Record.

Students will learn how paleontologists learn about and understand the past through the fossil record.

Using dinosaurs as the prime focus, topics include:

• fossilization
• stratigraphy and sedimentology
• scientific methodology
• anatomy
• growth and variation
• functional morphology
• reproduction
• speciation
• taxonomy
• phylogeny
• paleoecology
• physiology
• paleoethology
• extinction

Prerequisites: Secondary school Biology 30 or equivalent, and/or any first year science course.

More details

• The course is broken into five, progressively broader modules, first looking at the sorts of things a dinosaur would experience in one day, and then throughout its lifetime.
• Dinosaurs are then examined at the species level, and at higher taxonomic levels.
• Finally, the student is able to comprehend dinosaurs on a planetary scale throughout their 240 million year evolutionary history.

PALEO 200 is delivered entirely online as a MOOC (massive open online course), except for graded assessments that will take place at the University of Alberta main campus.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Identify major types of dinosaurs and be able to describe their primary morphological features.
• Describe the relationships of major dinosaur groups relative to each other and the major living vertebrate groups.
• Explain the scientific methods and techniques used to study dinosaur palaeobiology, including excavation and preparation, taxonomy, phylogeny, functional morphology, and palaeoecology.
• Analyze and evaluate both general news articles and popular culture representations of dinosaurs in the media for scientific accuracy.
• Critically evaluate testable hypotheses about dinosaur evolution, ecology, and behaviour.

Course Modules

• Module 1: One Day of a Dinosaur
• Module 2: One Life of a Dinosaur
• Module 3: One Species of a Dinosaur
• Module 4: One Planet of Dinosaurs

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