The Semester at a Glance
Deep Time & How Fossils Form
The geologic time scale, rock layers, radiometric dating, and how an animal becomes a fossil.
How to Read a Dinosaur
Skeletons, body mass, speed from trackways, growth rings, and the warm-blooded debate — the toolkit for everything after.
Triassic: Rise of the Dinosaurs
Life after the Great Dying, upright posture, and how small bipeds outlasted their rivals.
Jurassic: Age of Giants
Sauropod gigantism, long necks, air-sac breathing, stegosaur plates, and a splitting Pangaea.
Cretaceous: The Peak
Tyrannosaurs, horned and duck-billed dinosaurs, feathers, flight, and the first birds.
Extinction & a Changing Earth
The Big Five mass extinctions, the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous, and who survived.
Field & Lab Paleontology
Excavation, fossil prep, 3D scanning, paleontology careers, and your final project.
Welcome to Paleontology
Welcome in. Every dinosaur you've ever seen in a museum or a movie started as a few broken pieces in the ground. This class is about how scientists get from those pieces to a living, breathing animal — and how sure they can actually be.
We start with deep time and how fossils form, then learn to read a skeleton the way a paleontologist does. After that we walk through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous one period at a time, face the mass extinctions that reset life on Earth, and finish in the field and the lab doing the real work.
You don't need to know every dinosaur name coming in. Bring curiosity, a willingness to get your hands dirty, and good questions about the evidence — that's the whole deal.
Course Documents
The recurring sketch-and-observe sheet you'll use for every fossil and lab this term.
🔍How to tell bone from rock, and how to recognize the fossils we handle in class.
🗺️Every era and period covered this term, with the big events in each. One page. Print it.
⭐ Print this outA Note About AI
- Generate course images
- Build the interactive tools and field-notebook templates
- Format and layout lesson content consistently
- Draft activity instructions and rubrics
Paleontology is all about reasoning from evidence, so I use AI to help build this class — go ahead and use it too, especially to chase questions that go beyond what we cover. Just remember AI can confidently invent a dinosaur fact, so check it against real sources. The line is between using AI to learn and using it to skip learning.