Re: Ideas for Short Dinosaur Presentation

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@umd.edu>]

On Sat, February 18, 2012 2:46 pm, Dino Guy Ralph wrote:
> If you were going to put together a brief presentation on dinosaurs for a
> general audience, what would be the main topics that you would want to
> cover?  I'm talking about a fun little enrichment talk for high school or
> college level students, with just a handful of topics.  The idea is to
> cover the basics of dinosaur science rather than to devote the talk to a
> particular specialization ("Histology of an unidentifiable ornithischian
> bone fragment and its implications for reconstructing the Maastrichtian
> paleoecology of Australia " -- not).

What is a dinosaur? What isn't a dinosaur?
How fossils are formed. How fossils are discovered. How fossils are dated.
How we reconstruct the biology of dinosaurs. How we reconstruct the
appearance of dinosaurs.
Overview of dinosaur diversity: major sorts (including origin of birds)
New discoveries in the world of dinosaur science (esp. anything that has
been in the news in the last year or so, ESPECIALLY if it has been
misreported)
Q & A

> What topics would you include in a brief talk on the history of life on
> earth?  (Let's see just how fast this Wayback machine can go -- no time
> for the boring stuff)!

Basics of physical stratigraphy & biostratigraphy = how we know the world
is old
How rocks record ancient environments
Scale of geologic time
Origin of Earth, of the oldest rocks, of the oldest traces of life
Rise of photosynthesis, the Great Oxidation Event
Snowball Earth
Rise of multicellular animals
Cambrian Explosion
Diversification of marine forms
Colonization of land
P/Tr extinction event
The Age of Reptiles; rise of modern fauna
K/Pg extinction
The Age of Mammals; rise of the grasslands
Origins of hominins
Quaternary ice ages
Origin and spread of Homo sapiens
The Anthropocene

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Email: tholtz@umd.edu   Phone: 301-405-4084
Office: Centreville 1216
Senior Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology
Dept. of Geology, University of Maryland
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/
Fax: 301-314-9661

Faculty Director, Science & Global Change Program, College Park Scholars
http://www.geol.umd.edu/sgc
Fax: 301-314-9843

Mailing Address:        Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                        Department of Geology
                        Building 237, Room 1117
                        University of Maryland
                        College Park, MD 20742 USA