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The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs, Second Edition

	The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs, Second Edition,

 
David Fastovsky and David Weishampel, 2005, Cambridge University Press, New York, 485 p. (Hardcover, US $80.00) ISBN: 0-521-81172-4.

Every fall I teach GEOL 101—"Dinosaurs"—as an introductory, non-laboratory science class at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. To kick off the course, I conduct a brief learning survey of my students. It includes a series of questions that allow students to rank their understanding of a topic on a scale of 1–5 (1=I know everything about this; 5=I know nothing about this), as well as two questions aimed at finding out what the students want to learn in a course called "Dinosaurs." Without fail, my students want to know "why" and "how," NOT just "what" there is to know about dinosaurs. They want to know how we know what we know about dinosaurs, and what there is left to discover. Many of my students are non-science majors who have been attracted to the course because they have a comfortable familiarity with dinosaurs—even if their familiarity lies in a lingering 7-year-old's hankering for the ferocity of T. rex, the strangeness of Stegosaurus, or the monolithic stature of "Brontosaurus."

Dinosaurs often are marketed as a gateway to science, and what better field than dinosaur paleontology to demonstrate how ideas in science arise and evolve? With dinosaurs, things are always changing, old bones are being studied with new methods, and new hypotheses regularly are being tested and, in some cases, overturned. In my Dinosaurs course, I strive to teach my students the critical-thinking skills they need to evaluate the quality of science, and I want them to think about how science affects their lives. Whether the topic is evolution or stem-cell research, they should care and they should be equipped to evaluate what they hear on television and read in . . . [Full Text of this Article]

KRISTI CURRY ROGERS¹

¹ Department of Paleontology, Science Museum of Minnesota, 120 West Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, MN 55102