LARTS 355 Evolution of Life on the Planet
This course is a focused exploration of the co-evolution of life and Earth surface environments through time. Through in-class labs, lectures, and readings, students will investigate mass extinctions, rare and short-term events that collectively shaped the biological world we experience today. Can we reconstruct mass extinctions as evolutionary events, using the fossil record, aided by phylogenies based on comparative biology? Can we, in turn, use information in sedimentary rocks to understand the environmental perturbations that killed so many organisms? And, using physiology, can we understand causal relationships between environmental events and patterns of selective extinction (and survival) recorded by fossils? Can knowledge of this past provide useful perspective on current threats to biodiversity?