This lesson is intended to introduce evidence of common ancestry to students in an engaging way, without beating them over the head and trying to convince them that evolution is real. Instead, we ask students to identify bones while noticing details and wondering about the implications. Our hope is that students will become curious, ask questions, bring background knowledge to bear, and make hypotheses in a similar way to what Darwin and others must have done when they noticed similarities between bone structures.

The goal of this lesson is to prepare students to consider the possibility of common ancestry of all living things, understand homology, and prepare for a reading on whale evolution.

A Google slide show accompanying this lesson is available here.

The full Evolution: Unity and Diversity lesson set is available here.