A - Learning Outcome 4

This year my class allowed a group of students the chance to travel to Seymour Texas to study and work on the field of paleontology. During this trip we had bonding time as a team of junior paleontologists, as well as plenty of time and opportunities to study the time period we were digging into (the Permian Era) and the rock formations during the time. As a group we started our dig at the Craddock Ranch, a hot spot for finding Dimetrodon fossils. Dimetrodons were the apex predator during the Permian Era and we were able to learn a lot about them, including the fact that they are not dinosaurs but rather pre-mammalian synapsids and they were carnivores with large fins on their back, hypothetically to ward off competitors. This trip was also very informative geology-wise, as we did research before hand to learn about the place we would be working at and what sorts of rocks and other flora we would be immersed in.  We stayed on a ranch that provided a lovely safe haven for the end of each digging day, and also was a perfect place for us to spend time together and have fun talking about the day, eating, and playing board games.

This paleontology trip was very informative and a great way to put ourselves into the lives of a paleontologist. We woke up around sunrise every morning and committed to eating breakfast and getting out to the dig site as early as we could. We had to deal with all sorts of problems that really showed us how the field of paleontology is a struggle and requires a major investment into the study in order to appreciate the work. The weather, flora and fauna, impatience, and good memory were all factors that affected work during the day. We had to deal with cold in the morning followed by an extremely hot afternoon every day. We also had problems with scorpions and snakes as well as cacti trying to poke us everywhere we stepped. As for patience and memory, there was a lot of time during the day where we would dig a whole area out and find nothing which could be very disappointing, and if you left a tool or something you wanted to use behind, it was a 45 minute drive back into town to get it. The whole trip experience was also overseen by professional paleontologists who had been working at the site for many years and were able to show us all the methods and teach us a lot about the field, even more than the hours of research we had done before the trip, because being there in person really experiencing the difficulties firsthand is much different than any prep could be.


https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1t_Y7k_66jAYqiun1Wp6wwFlUdVfRQcG3haGqg4QZ-fk/edit#slide=id.p 

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