Tutorial on Da Vinci and his views on fossil distribution in Italy.
[I have not attempted to show slide breaks.]
Objectives:
To understand and organize text information from multiple sources;
To explore some of the discoveries of the person who was possibly the first modern
scientist;
To understand the process of fossilization.
Leonardo da Vinci
[Download instructions? The question requires that they do not take notes]
Watch the video on Leonardo da Vinci’s life without making notes. You can expect
questions on this.
[Show video on Leonardo da Vinci’s life. The problem with this exercise in front of a
computer is that they will probably cheat by looking information up instead of using their
memories of the video.]
Write down what information you remember from the video on Leonardo da Vinci’s life
using complete sentences as per the CSE style manual.
Arrange the information into a logical order and into paragraphs.
The Macroevolutionary Puzzle
Leonardo do Vinci also observed fossils and their distribution in the Italian mountains.
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions.
Of Floods and Fossils
1. About 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was brooding about sea shells entombed in
the layered rocks of northern Italy’s high mountains, hundreds of kilometers from the sea.
2. How did they (the shells) get there?
3. If he accepted the traditional explanation, he would have to agree that turbulent
floodwaters deposited shells in the mountains during the Great Deluge.
4. But many shells were thin, fragile – and intact.
5. Surely they would have been battered to bits if they had been swept across such
distances, then up the mountains.
6. Da Vinci also brooded about the rock layers.
7. They were stratified (stacked like cake layers), and some had shells but others none.
8. Then he remembered how large rivers deposit silt during spring floods.
9. Had the layers slowly accumulated one atop the other, as a series of silt deposits in the
past?
10. If so, the shells in the mountains would be evidence of a series of vanished
communities of organisms that had been gradually buried in the sea!
11. Da Vinci did not announce his novel idea, perhaps knowing it would have been met
with deafening silence, imprisonment, or worse.
12. By the 1700s fossils were being accepted as evidence of past life.
13. They were interpreted in a traditional way, as when a Swiss naturalist excitedly
unveiled the remains of a giant salamander and announced they were the skeleton of a
man who drowned in the Deluge.
14. By mid-century, however, scholars began to question such interpretations.
15. Extensive mining, quarrying, and canal excavations were under way.
16. The diggers were finding similar rock layers and similar fossil sequences in distant
places, such as the cliffs on both sides of the English Channel.
17. And some scholars started analyzing the discoveries for possible connections
between earth history and history of life.
18. Ever since, fossils have been analyzed in more and more refined ways.
19. Together with biochemical studies and other modern sources of information, they
provide good evidence of evolution over vast spans of time – of changes in the geologic
stage, and changes in the organisms that have marched across it.
Source: Star C. and Taggart R. Biology The unity and diversity of life 7th Edition.
1. Organize the passage into possible paragraphs, by grouping numbered sentences.
Example: Sentences 25—31 [Sentences 1—5, 6—11, 12—17 (or 12—13, 14—17 as
in Starr and Taggart 1995), 18—19]
2. Which sentences form the introduction? Give reasons for your answer. [Paragraph 1
or paragraphs 1 & 2]
3. Which sentences form the conclusion? Give reasons for your answer. [Sentences 18
& 19]
4. What is the “big picture” interpretation of this text passage?
Leonardo da Vinci’s Notes
Now read a translation of Leonardo da Vinci’s original text and then answer the question.
[Add attachment details]
Was your summary of observations based on reviewing the film reasonably accurate in
respect to his translated words? Explain any differences.