In Aurora, NC, there is a phosphate mine, deposited by an ocean millions of years ago that came further inland than our ocean today. The company that owns the mine is interested in phosphate for fertilizer, but that isn't the only thing that the ocean left behind.
However, the ocean left behind a story in the form of bones and shark teeth, known by the mine as reject material. Because it is processed by the mine it rarely attracts the interest of scientists. They've been removed from their original context, and so parts of the story are missing; whether they were ever articulated, they're surrounding geology, etc. And so, with paleontology already being a puzzle, more pieces are missing and study becomes more difficult. For this reason, its not a common project for professionals to take on. It's also huge; a five gallon bucket of teeth may hold hundreds or more. That means that there is a lot of data and almost no one to put it to use and tell its story.
However, Dr. Gates at NCSU has started work on it, and has called on the public to help him. Turning it into a citizen science project, he's made it possible for classes of all ages to to find, measure, and record shark teeth in a way that he can then analyze the data and learn more about the ecology of North Carolina before man. He'll do this with classes and folks at the museum, and has made it possible for teachers to follow a lesson plan surrounding the project, using the data collection to help students learn about paleontology and geology. Generally speaking, folks find and measure teeth, and even get to try to identify it and estimate the size of the shark. Most of the teeth found aren't from the gigantic sharks that most people hear about, and some have to found by microsorting. The reason for this is one of many questions that this will hopefully work towards answering.
The curriculum is also easily adaptable to the needs of a given class. And this time, I'm not speaking as a student or someone working at a museum. I'm speaking as someone who taught it.
Last fall, I was a TA for the ecology lab at NCSU under my professor from the year before. Each TA was responsible for setting up a lab and updating it as needed. The week that I was assigned to was more than a little out of date. However, I was aware of Dr. Gates project from being around the museum, and suggested to Dr. Wentworth that we adopt it into a new lab so that the students were being involved in a real project, and benefiting someones research.
We didn't want to just have the students record data, however. Dr. Gates had a lot of data already, and we had roughly 200 students to help. That had potential.
So rather than have them go through the procedure with the purpose of collecting data, we decided to put the method to the test. Citizen science uses individuals of all backgrounds to collect scientific data used for publishable research. For that reason, its important to establish that, despite a variation in backgrounds of the people who get involved, the data can be just as trusted as that taken by scientists.
Each student found a tooth, and tried their hand at identification. They then measured the teeth in five different directions using a ruler that is commonly given to students to use for this project. These measurements could be plugged into an equation to get an estimate of the length of the shark. They then took a picture with their phones, uploaded it to the computer, and used a program called ImageJ to get an extremely accurate measurement. The numbers can than be used to compare the two measurement methods, and determine if having the public use the rulers is an acceptable way to collect data.
It may seem flawed in that these students were taking a science class. However, they were from a wide variety of majors and years, and that gave variation to how much practice they had taking such measurements. None of them had practice with fossils, although two had an interest in marine biology.
I haven't seen the results. However, the numbers that I saw all seemed pretty close, and I expect that this will show that the data collection is valid.
No comments:
Post a Comment