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Fossil Evidence Inquiry Lab

Middle School Inquiry Lab on Fossil Evidence

In this lab students will use reasoning skills to analyze evidence gathered by paleontologists. Students develop and support their own inferences about dinosaur behavior based on evidence from fossil records.

Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:

  • What inferences can we make about Maiasaura by studying the evidence present in the fossil record?

BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:

Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.

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Materials List:

  • complete set of clues
  • extra data table, if needed

PROCEDURE:

Using the set of clues provided about Maiasaura, students will read through the clues and divide them according to the relationships that their group comes up with. Once students find connections, they will fill out a table explaining the links between the clues and what they learned from them.

CONCLUSION

Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:

  1. How can studying the fossil record give scientists clues about the existence, diversity, extinction, and change of life forms throughout history?
  2. Are there any characteristics of the Maiasaura in the fossil records that are still present in modern animals? If so, what could this tell us about these modern animals?

MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS

All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.

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STANDARDS ALIGNMENT

NGSS: 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 law operates today as in the past.

 

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