Join us for our annual Darwin’s Birthday celebration! This year, Bryce Hand, Professor Emeritus of Geology at SU, will give a talk called FOSSILS: Messages from Ancient Worlds (see below). And this year, to increase the birthday excitement, we invite you to bring along your favorite science-themed snack or dessert.
Come find us at the Community Library of DeWitt & Jamesville, downstairs in the large Community Room. We will also be Zooming the talk at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7630427646
Bryce is always a fascinating speaker, so please join us!
Are fossils scarce as those proverbial hens’ teeth? Not at all! In fact, many of our Syracuse buildings are literally made of them.
But are they more than curiosities? Absolutely!
Without fossils, we’d never have known dinosaurs existed. Or pterodactyls. Or trilobites. Biologists would long ago have figured out evolutionary relationships among organisms, but without fossils they’d have had no way of correctly reconstructing ancestors and intermediaries.
This talk will look at some of the ways organisms become part of the fossil record and at the many kinds of information they provide about past environments. And we’ll see why, without fossils, it would have been virtually impossible to establish time relationships between sedimentary layers in widely separated regions.
Simply put, fossils are important! Our knowledge of Earth’s past would be ever-so diminished without them.