Deciphering the History of Life

3 Credits.

The majority of Life that existed on our planet is extinct, and the small and number of lineages that survived into the present cannot tell a complete story of Life’s evolutionary history. To fill these blank pages, we need to explore the fossil record on Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system) for information that can be directly integrated with data for living organisms.This course tackles the reconstruction of the history of life from a practical and research-oriented perspective! We will explore concepts of evolution and survey the various approaches that allow us to extract biological information from modern and fossil samples. We will discuss the impact of fossilization on morphological and molecular character fidelity and integrate characters in the context of evolutionary relationships. We will discuss different data science tools used for evolutionary inferences, exemplified by guided in-session exercises. We will apply these skills when we move on to explore the anatomy, physiology, and ecology of animals through the lens of evolution. In this course, students will go through the complete cross-disciplinary process inferring an evolutionary process – translational skills, that will enable them to conduct independent research on the topic.