Dinosaurs and Our World: An Eclectic Elective

Origins and a Memorial

ESCI 1003 Dinosaurs and Our World premiered in Spring of 2018, but it had a past. The course’s forerunner, Dinosaur Evolution, Ecology, and Extinction began the Winter Quarter of 1995 as the second class I taught at the University of Minnesota. It was a lecture course without labs that purposely did not satisfy any liberal education (LE) requirement because I wanted the class to be one that students chose out of interest rather than necessity. 

However, the death of a first-year student, Dani Rodgers, led to the course’s present form. Dani was in my Fall 2016 class of ESCI 1001. She was fascinated with paleontology and made me promise to save a spot for her in the spring dinosaur course. Tragically, she died in an accident that December. While at her funeral, hearing how much Dani meant to her extended community, I realized ESCI 1003 should become a memorial to her. Yet, if it were to survive past my time at the U, the course needed to satisfy LE requirements. Consequently, my old dinosaur course was transformed into Dinosaurs and Our World. 

A Biological Science & A Christmas Year

Dinosaurs and Our World was designed as a biological science course to avoid competition with our other 1000-level courses. As such, the course needed a lab program, which fortuitously stretched Christmas out over a year as a constant stream of new purchases for the lab program kept Du Anne, my wife, and I happily busy opening packages and assembling materials throughout 2017. 

The ESCI 1003 labs’ goal is to allow students to explore animal designs in a tactile manner, handling materials they would normally only see behind museum glass. I wanted students to work directly with bones, casts, and a range of biological samples, including feathers and eggs, to explore the world of animal, dinosaur, and bird designs. Our present lab materials have thirty-three full skeletons, including casts of a silverback gorilla, bottlenose dolphin, and Smilodon, along with dozens of skeletal mounts and articulated limbs from small fossil horses to a sauropod forelimb. Over one hundred and fifty skulls found their way into the labs, varying in size from a hummingbird skull to a two-meter-long Edmontosaurus skull along with the large Utahceratops skull that adorns Tate Hall’s atrium. Belatedly, I discovered one does not really know just how large a hippopotamus skull is until you have to find a space to store it. And if opening shipments were like a year-round Christmas, it turned out that finding places to store crocodiles, fossil hominins, cave bears, and hell-pigs, might just be the greatest Easter egg hunt ever! 

Casts of trackways allow students to model the size and speed of past forms, and fossil trackways used in the course are up to four meters in length. Students also estimate animal masses by measuring the circumference of limb bones or bathing a suite of Tyrannosaurus rex models. They model the lift of bird wings using fans and compare the size, shapes, and color of fifty species of bird eggs to test hypotheses of their features.

One lab is a self-guided exploration of the Paleontology Hall at the Science Museum of Minnesota while extra credit explorations of the Bell Museum and Como Zoo allow students to explore modern animal designs. Our last lab is modeled on one in Justin Revenaugh’s block buster course, Geology and Cinema. Students have worked together to present fossil forms in non-traditional learning styles, using music, game show formats, breaking news segments, social media videos, and even Bob Ross style painting lessons. 

A student favorite lab is the cladistics lab in which students explore classification systems. While most cladistic labs use modern or hypothetical animals to demonstrate cladistics, ESCI 1003 students instead explore three dragon worlds. Each world includes fifteen dragon species which students examine to work out their probable evolutionary relationships. Since the dragon models were not designed with cladistics in mind, they do not perfectly dovetail into a predetermined scheme, so students get to work with a more ‘natural’ data set, despite their dragons being plastic. And to this day, purchasing scores of toy dragons remains one of my favorite requests to wrangle through the U’s accounting system. ;)

Approaching the Environment from a Mesozoic Perspective

The ‘and Our World’ part of the course name is crucial as ESCI 1003 also satisfies LE requirements for the Environment theme. That theme requires a course to focus on human interactions with the Environment, which at first seemed like a hurdle for a course set in the past. However, the Mesozoic Era was not only when our world first began to approach its modern configuration of continents but was also the time when its ecosystems began to approach their modern forms, simply with dinosaurs filling the roles of modern mammals.

But if the Mesozoic was when modern ecosystems came into being, the present is when we have begun to unravel them. So, in my lecture, on alternate Fridays we leave the Mesozoic to explore human impacts on, and interactions with, Earth’s ecosystems. We begin by exploring how a volcanic eruption and human innovations led to cholera becoming a pandemic disease. We then move on to explore how Carboniferous coal affected the development of the British Empire and our modern world. Pangea and the Permian mass extinction are used as a springboard to explore how we are recreating Pangea, not by plate tectonics but by trade, as planes and ships transport invasive species to create a new global ecosystem more vulnerable to mass extinction. The Triassic and Jurassic periods serve as segues to explorations of soil erosion and wetlands loss. While the Cretaceous period and End-Cretaceous mass extinctions are linked with modern climate change and the ongoing megafauna extinctions. 

Fantasy Monsters and the Social Nature of Science

Since much of the course explores animal designs, my lecture begins with a film battle between King Kong and three Tyrannosaurus rex. We go on to explore why Tyrannosaurus rex could exist, yet a giant ape like King Kong never could have and finish the class comparing Godzilla’s body design favorably to Kong’s. It is an unusual approach but resonates well with students.

One of my favorite lectures though, came from the original 1995 course offering in which we explore how racism indirectly affected dinosaur interpretations, transforming them from leaping, snarling dynamic animals into the slow tail-dragging, intellectually-challenged creatures of my childhood. Throughout the course, we continue to focus on the social nature of science, exploring how dinosaurs were interpreted in light of existing controversies, or used in failed attempts to disprove the idea of evolution or to support the British monarchy.

A science course that devotes considerable time to social aspects is atypical today and I suspect it may have been unique three decades ago. 

The Present and the Future

The College of Science and Engineering’s generous support of the course’s laboratory program development was recouped by new tuition revenue during the course’s inaugural semester. Every semester, ESCI 1003 fills so early in the registration cycle that only five percent of the class are first year students and four-fifths of the class are juniors and seniors, many of whom have tried to get into the course since their first year. 

In 2019, Peter Makovicky, an actual dinosaur paleontologist, joined the department, ensuring that Dinosaurs and Our World will continue on long after I fade into the sunset.