Vertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution

This resource is designed to familiarise you with the diversity and evolutionary history of vertebrates through analysing images of specimens held at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology. It contains seven chapters: an introduction to vertebrate diversity, Fishes, the fish-tetrapod transition, Amphibians and Amniotes, Lepidosaurs and Chelonians, Archosaurs, and Birds and flight. All images have accompanying text, including information about the specimen plus hints about what to look for and the questions to consider when analysing the images. Please note that this resource does not look at mammals in detail – instead, this fascinating group are given a more thorough treatment in another Object Based Learning for Higher Education (OBL4HE) resource entitled ‘Vertebrate Diversity’ and the Virtual Educational Resource for the Biosciences (VERB) resource ‘Eutherians’, both of which can be found on JORUM by searching for the key words OBL4HE and VERB respectively. This resource has been uploaded as a web site zip file to be used within a browser (once unzipped, navigate to the index.html file in the folder to run the resource) and as a .elp file (allowing modification in eXe content packaging software, in addition to subsequent packaging in the desired format, e.g., IMS Content Package, Web Pages). This resource has been created as part of the JISC funded project Object Based Learning for Higher Education (OBL4HE) - a project to create a range of online educational resources for university teachers and students based around the use of museum collections and archival material for enhancing learning. To search for more of the resources created in this project, please search for the key word OBL4HE