Friday, July 1, 2016

IF Homework - Chapter 7

The expedition in Chapter 7 recalls Marsh's student expedition to further expand his collection. His students endured blistering temperatures, exhausting hours, etc to find various dinosaur fossils to the Peabody Museum. The expedition holds significance to the modern time because it further describes the trials, experiences, and tribulations that Marsh and his students went through to amass his collection. Marsh in the process picked up a rival, Cope, over their expedition finds in which they stopped at nothing to outdo each other. Both sides would rush to find new fossils, publish (although not well written in order to move on), etc that it's said that two later paleontologists would devote 30 years to analyze and interrupt all of the papers to make sense out of them. Through reading the chapter, you'll learn how deeply passionate Marsh was and with the help of his students, to further expand his collection for those to reference in later times. Thanks to the expeditions, evidence to further corroborate Darwin's theory of evolution through horse toes and the toothed bird Ichthyornis disbar, was found with Hesperornis which created the link between reptiles and birds.

Reading Marsh's experiences in his conquest to further his collection is very similar to those students at Rutgers University in the article. You find both parties out of the classroom to get a hands on experience discovering new species in their respective fields. Where the article differentiates is that the whole going out of the classroom idea is to get students engaged into learning more about plants instead of the classic textbook way while Marsh did so to expand his collection. Marsh's side found him in more of a rivalry that him and Cope became obsessed over. Overall, both sides seemed to expand their knowledge for both themselves and future students to learn.

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