So the other
day I gave my first undergraduate lecture, An
Introduction to Fossils, as part of the second year Skills for Earth Scientist’s module. I was asked to do it over
Christmas as the Professor in charge of the module is a full-on physical sedimentologist,
with a total disdain for anything living that might wiggle around and mess up
her nice strata with its bioturbation and burrowing.
My first
thoughts were that of horror and panic as I imagined a classroom full of half
awake, hungover, dead-eyed students staring at me blankly while I struggled to
remember the difference between the different forms of rhabdosome in
graptolites. Luckily, however, it was explained that this was a true
introduction and most of these students had absolutely no prior knowledge on
the subject so I was to keep it basic – Panic over, I'm good at basic.
A couple of
mornings and my trusty undergraduate textbook of Rhona M. Black, The Elements of Palaeontology (1970) was
all it took to throw together half an hour covering such basics as:
• What is a fossil? And the differences
between body and trace fossils
• Why are we interested in them? What are
uses? (biostratigraphy, palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, oil exploration, etc.)
• How do fossils form? (Moulds, casts, etc.)
• What conditions aid fossilisation? - Preservation
potential, lagerstรคtten,
bias in the fossil record
And of course plenty of
pretty pictures of the various types of common invertebrate fossils to
(hopefully) keep everyone interested.
When the
morning of the lecture came, I was surprisingly chilled out about it and –
aside from blank faces and awkward silences whenever I asked the room a question
– all went quite well. Nobody threw anything, fell asleep, or walked out early –
they all even stayed long enough to practice drawing and labelling an ammonite
(even if a few did just draw random spirals instead of actually looking at
their specimen properly). The follow up practical was pretty good too, an hour
of drawing various common fossil specimens in the lab resulted in some nice
sketches of trilobites, crinoids and echinoderms – here’s my example sketch of
a Micraster I did to show what was expected:
 |
| My sketch of a Micraster cast |
So, all in all,
it was an unexpectedly enjoyable experience – now I just need to (finally) finish my
thesis and find a university that’ll pay me to do more of it…
