Due There have been five mass extinction events over the last 600 million years. Besides your responsibilities involved in leading and participating in student discussions and doing a few instructor generated laboratories, you will be expected to produce a fossil collection and a research project. Each student will compile a fossil collection. This collection is not restricted to fossils of any particular age, although it will likely be dominated by the locally available fauna. Specimens must be collected by the students themselves, purchased samples are unacceptable.
Trace fossils are acceptable.
The fossils will be identified to the lowest taxonomic level possible, preferably to species. The specimens will be curated in a professional fashion. In addition to the labeling of the specimens, a short guide to the collection will be written. This will consist of a series of approximately paragraph long descriptions of each specimen, detailing any additional information about it. Perhaps this fossil is indicative of a particular depositional environment, or known to only a narrow range of time, or is thought to play a particular ecological role.