Exploring the Lost Worlds: Using Local Environments to Make the Fossil Record Relevant

Despite our best efforts, students sometimes struggle to find science content relevant if it is far removed from their everyday lived experiences. In Earth Science, geologic time is longer than students’ lived experiences of days, weeks, and years. Yet, geologic time is an essential earth science concept and part of the NGSS (e.g., MS-ESS1-4). We make geologic time relevant by using place-based learning. We selected three different time intervals– Devonian, Carboniferous, and Pleistocene– to teach students about what the environment of our location looked like long ago. However, different states have different geologic time periods that may be more suitable, so we have included information at the end of this article about how to find that information in your state to make this activity resonate with students in your communities. In this article, we describe how we help our students investigate fossils from these time periods, scientifically accurate artistic representations of what those environments looked like, and what the continents looked like during those time periods. Through these place-based investigations, we found our students were much more interested than in previous years to learn about how to use rock strata and fossils to determine relative ages.