Animal Diversity: Evolution

Early Evolution

  1. The Origin of the Earth. The Age of the Earth: How do we know?
  2. See the Origin of Life for an introduction to early evolution.
  3. Read an excerpt from "The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life".
  4. Life, Life Everywhere. The origin of life seems more and more inevitable- or does it?
  5. An Interview with Stanley Miller.
  6. Molecular Evolution Home Page.
  7. Published Works on Biochemical Evolution.
  8. Molecular Evolution: A brief summary with definitions.
  9. The Molecular Anatomy of an Ancient Adaptive Event.
  10. See also, Cosmic Ancestry (Panspermia).
  11. Archean Paleobiology. Very early beginnings.
  12. The Origin of Mitochondria in Eukaryotic Cells. See also "Endosymbiotic Theory"
  13. More on the origin of mitochondria is here.
  14. Changing Perspectives on the Origin of Eukariotes.
  15. Mix and Match in the Tree of Life. Read it here.
  16. Early eukaryotic cell fossils can be scoped out here.
  17. Early microfossils.
  18. Extreme evironments: See pix here.
  19. Protists to Metazoans.
  20. The Origin of Animal Body Plans.
  21. The Dawn of Animal Life: From the Formation of the Earth to the Ediacarans.
  22. Old Worms, New Theories (with links!)
  23. Read about the Cambrian Period diversification.
  24. Welcome to the Cambrian!
  25. Paleogeographic Atlas of the World (more detail is here).. An animation based on these maps can be seen here.
  26. Geologic Time.
  27. Geology and Geologic Time. Also, read about plate tectonics and view the animation. Then visit the page on Stratography.

Mechanisms of Evolution Topics

  1. An Illustrated Guide to the Origin of Species. From the BBC.
  2. Introduction: What is evolution, and what is needed?
  3. Evidence for Evolution.
  4. What is Evolution?: This will be helpful in later discussions.
  5. Introduction to Evolutionary Biology: Read this carefully. It presents the major concepts of evolutionary biology.
  6. Where it all began: A website devoted to the Galapagos Islands. Jump to beak pix.
  7. If interested, read The Voyage of the Beagle (NOTE: This is not an assignment!). The entire text, by Charles Darwin.
  8. Speciation.
  9. Architecture and Evolution.
  10. Richard Dawkins home page. Lots of useful evolution links.
  11. Clock Photoreceptor Shared by Plants and Animals.
  12. Listen to a lecture by Richard Dawkins.
  13. Does Evolutionary History Take Million-Year Breaks?
  14. Covergent evolution. Read a short discussion here. See an example here.
  15. Taxonomic Levels.
  16. In Search of the First Flower.
  17. Night comes to the Cretaceous. Read about the KT boundary. More on mass extinctions here. A Scientific American article is here.
  18. Extinction Level Events.
  19. Read T. rex and the Crater of Doom.
  20. Did bigger brains for throwing accuracy jump-start language? Read the synopsis here, the full article here.

Evidence for Evolution

  1. Transitional Vertebrate Fossils: Just skim this for supporting evidence.
  2. Observed Instances of Speciation: Don't read for content.
  3. Evidence for Evolution: Just try a five or so of these. It would probably be nice if you chose your five randomly, rather than taking just 1-5 so that we have a variety of examples to talk about in class.
  4. Fossil examples from 540 MYBP: The main thing here is just to look at the pix and read the short description.
  5. More Fossil Pix. See also fossil types here.
  6. Visit the Nova Television presentation "Odyssey of Life".
  7. Fossils of Kentucky.
  8. Nice fossil page here.
  9. Tropical Paradise at the Cretaceous Poles? Read for content. This article shows how fossil evidence can be used to reconstruct an entire ecosystem.

Evolution Resources

  1. Evolution resources.
  2. The Talk.Origins Archive. A discussion of the creation/evolution controversy.
  3. Overview of animal phyla.
  4. The future of evolutionary biology.
  5. Strange Science: The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology. Oops.