Classroom Resources

This film explores how life recovered after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and how those events shaped the diversity of plants and mammals on Earth today.

This interactive module explores the environmental factors and species involved in five major mass extinctions.

Several questions are embedded within the short film The Day the Mesozoic Died, which tells the story of the scientific quest to explain one of the greatest, long-standing scientific mysteries: the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.

This animated short video celebrates the early 20th-century German astronomer and atmospheric scientist Alfred Wegener, who first proposed that continents once formed a single landmass and had drifted apart.

This activity reinforces concepts presented in the short film The Making of a Theory. Using a map of the Malay Archipelago and information about the animals found on different islands, students discover the Wallace Line: a sharp boundary that separates distinct Asian and Australian fauna.

This activity guides students through building a conceptual model of how carbon dioxide affects Earth’s climate.

This activity explores the concepts and research presented in the short film The Origin of Species: The Making of a Theory, which documents the epic voyages of naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

This film explores the epic voyages of Darwin and Wallace that led each to independently propose the natural origin of species and formulate the theory of evolution by natural selection.

This film tells the story of the scientific quest to explain one of the greatest, long-standing scientific mysteries: the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.

This activity supports concepts covered in the film The Day the Mesozoic Died. Students will analyze geological evidence from 10 different sites around the world to predict the location of the asteroid impact that caused the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

This interactive module explores key events in the record of life on Earth, which stretches over three billion years.

This activity supports concepts covered in the short film The Day the Mesozoic Died. Students analyze graphs and data on pollen grains and fern spores to form a picture of the living landscape before and after the mass extinction that marked the end of the age of the dinosaurs.