activities with sedimentary rocks and fossils in the Cenomanian of Figueira da Foz (Portugal) and Tamajón (Spain)

UID/HIS/04209/2013Fieldwork activities could be important strategies for the outdoor learning of Geology, as a complement of the practical hands-on of minerals, rocks, fossils and models. They have been increasingly used in the last years, by teachers and students of different grades, and planned in line with the formal teaching taught in the classroom and contextualized with themes adopted by the national curricula of Natural Science. Our purpose is to explore an Iberian context of cooperation, using examples of outcrops with analogous stratigraphic contexts of the same age, and closely related facies, fossils and palaeoenvironments, to develop these outdoor activities around concepts of stratigraphy, sedimentology and palaeontology. Two Cenomanian (Upper Cretaceous) sections with fossiliferous marine carbonate units (Figueira da Foz, in Portugal, and Tamajón, in Spain) have been chosen, due to the many stratigraphic and palaeontological characteristics they have in common, allowing students to understand that despite distance, both geographical areas can be compared, as they shared contemporaneous flora and faunas and a common overall palaeogeography, when the Iberian microplate was extensively flooded by shallow warm seas.publishersversionpublishe