Download Specimen Investigation (Touch Table)

Specimen Investigation (Touch Table)
Curriculum/Lesson Plan
Big Idea:
Participants will feel a sense of excitement
and curiosity about the natural world.
General Understandings:
• Utah is full of extreme mammals
• Mammals have evolved a wide variety
of features to help them survive
• All mammals share some common
characteristics
Process:
1. Set up one/two large banquet tables with tablecloths. Place stepstools in front
for younger participants.
2. Lay out the mammal specimens, hand lenses, microscopes, and slides
3. Encourage guests to come and observe/touch the different items. Guests are
free to explore and touch anything they are interested in.
4. Help participants use the microscopes to looks at the slides and specimens
5. Encourage guests to ask questions about what they are observing
6. Encourage guests to draw conclusions and make inference about these mammal
adaptations
7. Encourage guests to sort items in ways that seem natural to them
8. Share with guests information about mammal adaptations and features
Essential Questions to ask Participants:
To encourage inquiry and observation • What do you notice about…?
• Where have you seen something like this before?
• What is the same and what is different here?
• What does this feature/adaptation do for this mammal?
• Can you make any guesses about what animal this came from?
• What conclusions can you make from this information?
• What do you wonder about…?
Engage, Explore, Explain:
• Guests will touch and observe the different touch table specimens
• Volunteer should encourage guests to:
o Look closely (used hand lenses & microscopes)
o Carefully touch the specimens
o Share their observations
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o Ask questions
o Sort the specimens in a way that seems natural and explain why
o Draw conclusions based on observations
Supplies:
Antelope Island Specimens:
• 2 Mountain Goat furs
• 2 Moose furs
• 2 Kangaroo furs
• 2 Caribou furs
• 2 Bear furs
• 2 Beaver furs
• 1 Unidentified piece of
black fur
• 1 Bison skull
• 1 Big Horn Sheep skull
• 1 Pronghorn horn
Other:
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New (mammal) slide box
Curriculum
Sign
Tablecloth
Hand sanitizer
Laminated photos
Hand lenses (x6)
Magi scopes (x2)
Dissecting microscopes
(x2)
Stepstools (x3)
Extension chord
Power strip
Gaffers tape
Essential Skills:
• Wonder, Explore, Ask Questions
• Imagine Possibilities and Outcomes
• Use What You Know, Transfer Learning
• Step Back and Look at the Whole Picture
• Support Ideas with Reasons Why
• Look Carefully
Evaluation:
• Did participants engage actively in the program?
• Did participants generate questions?
• Did participants leave with a greater sense of excitement and curiosity about
Utah’s extreme mammals?
• Did interpreter honor prior knowledge of the participants? (Was the activity
“authentic learning”?)
• Would participants be able to answer the essential questions?
• Did the activity lead to the understandings?
• Did the interpreter endeavor to engage all learning levels and learning styles?
• Did you notice anything that people consistently get confused about?
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Specimen Investigation
Background Information
Overview
Mammals are one of the 6 main classes of animals. There are only about 4,000
kinds of mammals. This sounds like a lot, but when you consider there are 21,000 kinds
of fish and a whopping 800,000 kinds of insects you’ll realize mammals are a pretty
small class!
Mammals’ characteristics include numerous adaptations that enable them to
survive in a wide range of environments. They live in nearly every habitat around the
globe, from frigid Polar Regions, to turbulent seas, to dense tropical forests. Modern
mammals range in stature from tiny field mice to massive whales and although various
species may look drastically different, all mammals still share a unifying set of
characteristics.
Some mammal characteristics—such as their hair, mammary glands, and three
specialized middle-ear bones—are shared by no other groups of animals. At this touch
table participants can explore mammals and some of their unique features to gain a
better understanding of mammal characteristics.
Shared Mammal Characteristics
• All mammals are warm blooded
• Most young are born alive
• They have hair or fur on their bodies
• Every mammal is a vertebrate
• All mammals have lungs to breathe air
• Mammals feed milk to their babies
Mammal Fur
Do you know what makes a mammal a mammal? One of the things is hair. Hair is closely
related to fingernails, snake scales, and feathers because all are made of keratin. Hair
does a number of things for mammals. It protects the skin from sun and scrapes, sends
sensory messages to the brain, and provides insulation from cold and heat. The shape of
hair also gives a mammal a unique look with its different shapes; round hairs tend to be
straight; oval or flattened hairs are curly.
Hair Types - Not all hair is the same. There are 3 different types of hair:
1. Guard hairs - are the ones most obvious to see. They are protective or "guard"
outer hairs of a mammal's coat. They are typically firm and glossy. Some hairs
grow to a particular length and stop; others grow continually, like human head
hair, horse manes, and quills of a porcupine. 2. Vibrissae or whiskers - stiff hairs, usually long, with many nerves at their base.
They are extremely sensitive to touch. These hairs give the mammal clues about
its immediate surroundings. Facial whiskers are most familiar, but they also
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appear in other places on a mammal's body such as on the ankles of a squirrel or
the rump of some crevice-roosting bats.
3. Underhairs - these hairs are short, curly, wooly, and are called down or fuzz.
Insulation is the most important role of these hairs. Special glands secrete oil to
waterproof the skin and hair. Deer have hollow hairs in winter, which provides
more warmth.
Extreme Mammals: From the American Museum of Natural History’s Exhibit Guide
Headgear
"Check out the ossicones on that giraffe." OK, that may sound a little
weird, but it's better than "Look at the tooth on that narwhal."
Either way, we're talking about headgear here--from the relatively
small ossicones on the head of a giraffe to the large left incisor that projects from
the narwhal whale's upper jaw as a tusk. Strangely enough, as many mammals
that developed horns, antlers, tusks or ossicones--from deer and sheep to cattle
and goats--no early mammals had horns on their heads.
Despite that original lack of headgear, some mammals, like the male
moose, evolved antlers as wide as a car over millions of years. Others,
like Embolotherium andrewsi, developed horns as support systems for their giant
noses (and to head-butt rivals).
But why? Why do we now see these extreme examples of headgear when
mammals once roamed the earth with plain-old heads, bones and teeth?
Defense, recognition and mating--three common reasons threaded
throughout evolution. Nearly all mammals with headgear are prey animals and
sometimes use their headgear as defense against would-be attackers.
Most mammals with headgear live in social groups rather than alone-using headgear as a quick way to recognize kin. For male mammals, head
"decor" can be an eye-catching way to advertise vigor and desirability to females
and strength and dominance to males.
Noses
After a look at some of the more extreme noses among mammals, you
might rethink the saying "It's as plain as the nose on your face." In fact, you
might never say that again.
Take Macrauchenia, for example. This extinct mammal lived in South
America more than 10,000 years ago. Its camel-like body and giraffe-like neck
supported one of the most extreme mammal noses: a long, flexible trunk, which
is similar but smaller than an elephant's.
Researchers figured out that Macrauchenia had such a unique nose not
by finding remnants of the actual trunk - the soft tissue of the trunk wouldn't
have lasted 10,000 years. By comparing earlier skulls of members of the
genus Macrauchenia to later ones, scientists noticed that over thousands of
years, the nasal cavity "moved" back toward the top of the head as new species
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evolved.
On the other hand, the modern elephant's trunk, while more familiar to
humans, is amazingly versatile for a nose. From acting as a giant straw to
signaling other animals, elephants use their noses for a lot more than smelling.
Teeth
Mammals' mouths contain up to four main types of teeth: incisors,
canines, premolars, and molars. This basic but incredibly flexible tool kit evolved
early in the evolutionary history of mammals. Trying to describe some of the
more extreme sets of teeth across the mammal world could end up sounding like
the boldest of infomercials-- "they slice, they dice, they chop down trees - these
teeth will probably save your life." It's all true, though...and then some.
Consider whales--some have teeth as big as a slice of pizza and others
have none at all. Instead, those toothless whales have baleen--a hard, fringed
material that hangs from each side of the roof of the mouth like vertical blinds.
With some baleen more than 13 feet long, it works like an extremely efficient,
gigantic sieve to capture tiny crustaceans and fish.
How about teeth that never stop growing? Like other rodents, beavers
really need their incisors - specialized teeth at the front of your smile. Without
these sharp, strong teeth, they couldn't gnaw bark to eat, or fell trees to build
dams and lodges. So, as with all rodents, their chisel-sharp incisors have evolved
to never stop growing.
And, of course, there is the Tasmanian devil. This averaged-size,
endangered animal from the Australian island of Tasmania towers about 12
inches tall, yet packs the strongest bite-force for its size of any mammal.
Brains
Mammals have large brains for their body size--larger than most
members of other vertebrate groups.
Just as mammals come in all sizes, so do their brains. But it's the size of
the brain relative to the size of an animal's body that really matters.
The aye-aye stands less than a foot-and-a-half tall with a brain the
volume of a golf ball. The extinct Columbian mammoth had a brain bigger than a
cabbage that weighed about 11 pounds. It turns out that the aye-aye trumps the
massive mammoth because, for their body size, an aye-aye's brain is more
enlarged.
Humans claim the largest brain relative to body size at more than seven
times the predicted size ratio. But the same relationship does not hold true for all
individual parts of our brain. Our olfactory bulb - the area of the brain that
processes smells - is smallest in relative size when compared to the opossum, the
wolf and the platypus. The winner? The opossum.
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Skin, Hair, Armor
What's 11 feet tall, 10,000 years old, and wears a skirt? The woolly
mammoth...obviously!
During the dawn of the 20th century, explorers discovered 10,000 yearold mammoth hair in the Alaskan Arctic. These huge mammals developed thick
layers of hair to protect their skin from frigid weather. Among the layers were 3foot-long (90 centimeters) strands of hair covering the flanks and belly in a "skirt"
like those on musk oxen living today.
The woolly mammoth's coat seems like a fairly mild adaptation when
compared to the Chinese pangolin, an endangered mammal living in the forests
and grasslands of Central and Southeast Asia. When frightened, pangolins roll
into a ball and, using strong muscles in their skin, raise their scales into a series of
sharp blades. Their line of defense doesn't stop there--pangolins can target
attackers with jets of foul-smelling liquid.
In fact, the evolution of mammalian skin has taken some pretty extreme
turns - from the flexible, bony shells of the armadillo to the pangolin's scales to
barbed quills of the porcupine.
Tails
If humans still had tails, the world might look a little different. But our
ancestors lost their tails about 18 million years ago. Today, humans retain only
the shortest remnants--just a few hidden bones at the base of the pelvis. Many
other mammal tails are remarkably long, though, and some have a range of
unusual uses.
The howler monkey of northern South America has a prehensile, or
grasping, tail the same size as its body--about three feet--that it uses for
navigating its native cloud- and rainforests.
The woolly monkey, a central South American tree-dweller, occasionally
strolls through the forest on the ground, using its tail as a brace--nature's built-in
tripod.
Reproduction
When you take a look at the reproductive habits of some mammals, you'll
find it is sometimes a little more interesting than the standard "birds and the
bees."
The average female human is pregnant for about 280 days and its baby is
completely helpless at birth. Human babies actually remain dependent on their
parents longer than any other species--mainly because our unusually large brains
take years to develop fully.
A female giraffe is pregnant for about 457 days--some six months longer
than a human. And when the giraffe finally does give birth, the young are so fully
developed that they can walk within hours. This adaptation is common among
large, hoofed plant eaters that live in open spaces and must be able to flee from
predators.
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A small handful of mammals, the monotremes (such as the platypus), lay
eggs. This is unusual for mammals but normal for most other vertebrates.
Marsupials give birth to tiny, hairless, and immature young who further
develop in their mothers' pouch. There they continue to grow, getting
nourishment by drinking milk.
For the more promiscuous side of mammals, look no further than these
two: the Shaw's jird, a small African desert rodent that can mate 224 times in
two hours; and Bonobos, who engage in sexual activity numerous times a day
with almost every other member of their group, male and female alike. Bonobos,
by the way are the closest living relatives of humans, along with chimpanzees.
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