Evolutionary Science Websites

I really wanted to also embed the video for "My Brother The Ape" (also by They Might Be Giants, from the album "Here Comes Science", but I was unable to find a link to something already online. So, only one video, and a ton of websites, this time! Can you tell that I think that evolution, genetics and biology are pretty darn interesting?

Ray Troll's Planet Ocean. Ray Troll is one of my favorite artists, and is a hands-down inveterate Northwestern fish lovin' paleontologically interested kind of guy. This website has tons and tons of drawings and scientific explanations of ocean creatures from different epochs, and explicit evolutionary linking from fish to modern human. There are lots of interactive things to click on, and the whole site is both fun to explore and very informative about evolutionary processes, stops along the way, and weird dead end off-branches. Don't forget to go see the "EVOLV-O-VISION" animation. I would use this website with students between the grades of 3 and 6.

Tree of Life Interactive. This website is an incredible resource. The website is set up as a three-dimensional interactive relationship chart beginning with the first living organisms and touching on most basic species groups. Connections between species can be seen visibly down the tree chart, and if the branch of phylum or class has a name where the species similarity diverges, it is named. When selecting a species to look at, many have either external sites that are linked that have extensive information about subspecies and other relatives, some have three dimensional models that can be explored on-site, and some have downloadable material. I would use this website with middle school students, as it is a fairly sophisticated site, and covers fairly sophisticated material.

Who Wants to Live a Million Years? This is an interactive game that demonstrates the processes of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the bottlenecking influences of external forces like temperature, predation, and ability to reach food. It's a pretty short, game, each million years lasts through three rounds of bottleneck events. If your species does not survive, you are invited to try again. This website would be great to use with children in grades 2 and up.

PBS Kids Dog Breeding Game. This game gives kids an experiential example of Gregor Mendel's pea experiment that we all eventually learn about. By combining different parent dogs, the goal is to develop a dog with the desired traits based on the parent dogs' traits. Genes are referred to, but not alleles, so if you are working with older children, you may want to do some vocabulary building. The success rate in the game is variable, so students may not experience immediate success; they will have to try again more than once if they play the game all the way through. This website would also be great to use with children in grades 2 and up.

Evolving Planet Tour Through Time. This website has an interactive timeline with a selection of plant and animal species that can be clicked on for more information in each epoch. The timeline discusses major extinction events, and what probably caused them, ending with the current epoch and the mass extinctions that are currently being caused by the influence of homo sapiens. I would use this website with children in 4th grade and up, as some of the words and concepts are a little bit hard. Students who are particularly interested in the history of life on earth may do well with this page at any age.

Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals. This website used up a lot of my time this week, because it is so rich in information I literally had to tear myself away from searching through it. This site goes very in depth into what makes an animal a mammal, with interactive pictures, small matching games, and a TON of great information. I would love to use this site with 3rd grade and up, possibly doing reports on different kinds of mammals.

Devolve Me! This is kind of a fun website, pictures of faces can be uploaded and given traits of evolutionary ancestors of humans. Not 100% educational, but definitely amusing. I would use this website with older students, 5th-6th grade and up, because older children are more likely to be able to understand that the computer manipulation of their photograph does not necessarily represent what their ancestors REALLY looked like, only a fun suggestion, a toy, really.

Becoming Human This website is a pretty comprehensive overview of what we know of human evolution to date. This site, like the mammals site listed above, is chock full of incredibly good information, games, and videos. I'd use this website with older students, 5th grade and up, because a lot of the language is pretty sophisticated, and one of the games, (DNA matching) would probably need a good deal of explanation to someone who has not sequenced genes in the past; I think it would be easier to explain a concept like that to students who were a little older and more ready to think about the small parts of organisms that cause species differentiation.