Description
- Title: Plesiosaurs and other Large Marine Reptiles
- Air Date: April 11, 2019
- Series: Smithsonian Science How webcasts, which are designed to connect natural history science and research to upper-elementary and middle-school students.
Join Paleobiologist Laura Soul to learn about giant marine reptiles that once dominated the sea, like plesiosaurs. Laura will introduce your students to several related groups of marine reptiles, like pliosaurs and elasmosaurs, while sharing her research and discoveries about how the body shapes and sizes of these animals, like their long-necks, evolved and changed over time.
Teaching Resources
Use these resources to support pre/post activities.
Companion Worksheet and Answers: Plesiosaurs
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
Life Science
3rd Grade
- 3-LS2-1 Construct an argument that some animals form groups that help members survive.
- 3-LS3-1 Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence that plants and animals have traits inherited from parents and variation of these traits exists in a group of similar organisms.
- 3-LS3-2 Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment
- 3-LS4-3 Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
4th Grade
- 4-LS1-1 Construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.
5th Grade
- 5-LS2-1 Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.
Grades 6-8
- MS-LS4-1 Analyze and interpret data for patterns in the fossil record that document the existence, diversity, extinction, and change of life forms throughout the history of life on Earth under the assumption that natural laws operate today as in the past.
Earth Science
4th Grade
- 4-ESS1-1 Identify evidence from patterns in rock formations and fossils in rock layers to support an explanation for changes in a landscape over time.
Grades 6-8
- MS-ESS1-4 Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence from rock strata for how the geologic time scale is used to organize Earth’s 4.6-billion-year-old history.
