Digital Learning Week 2013: Morpholution

A group high school students got the opportunity to use cutting-edge digital tools to carry out their own small-scale investigation of evolutionary relationships between mammals in a program called "Morpholution" during the Museum's Digital Learning Week in January.

Led by Museum scientists and educators, students learned how to navigate Morphobank, a web application used by researchers to record and analyze traits of various species—including, just recently, for a major study by Museum scientists and colleagues that traced the ancestor of placental mammals, which was published in the journal "Science" in February. (Learn more about that study in the video response below, "Researchers Reconstruct the Common Ancestor of Placental Mammals.)

Students gathered data about presence or absence of various traits in different species of mammals by examining specimens from Museum collections and by exploring exhibits in Akeley Hall of African Mammals, Hall of Asian Mammals, and the Wallace Wing of Extinct Mammals and their Relatives. As they entered their findings into Morphobank, they learned how scientists document and communicate evolutionary data, then generated evolutionary trees based on the data they had collected during the day.

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Видео Digital Learning Week 2013: Morpholution канала American Museum of Natural History