Activity Description
Overview
Students will use shared characteristics to identify the closest living relatives among a set of animals. Then they use fossils to investigate whale lineage from the last common ancestor of whales and deer to today.
- Designed for group of up to 5 students each
- Grades 3-8 or Ages 8-14
- Activity should take 30-40 minutes to complete
Summary
In this two-part activity, students explore the idea of common ancestry by making hypotheses about relatedness among whales, deer, tigers, seals, and sharks. They use an evolutionary tree to keep track of their hypotheses and observations about these animals. Upon learning that whales and deer are closely related, they move to Part 2, in which they compare traits visible in modern and fossil skeletons to understand more about whale ancestry. Students split into two paleontology roles — the lead researcher and the field paleontologists. They work together to build a whale evolutionary tree that tracks their observations and hypotheses about when and how shared derived traits evolved. Then they use the tree to pose and answer questions about the nature of change over time, looking particularly at how terrestrial mammals evolved to live in marine habitats.
Download Materials to Use in Your Classroom
You can print and play this activity using a basic color printer and a laminator, or you can choose to produce something a bit more durable and high fidelity with off-the shelf purchases, 3D printer, and custom print shop. Find instructions for each option below.
We advise that no more than 5 students engage in the activity at a time. Multiple copies may be necessary to have an entire classroom divide into groups that do the activity at the same time.
