14 April 2015
Compare and contrast: Two Chesapectens
Posted by Callan Bentley
Two new GIGAmacro images of fossil scallops from Virginia’s Coastal Plain –
Chesapecten nefrens:
link
Chesapecten jeffersonius:
link
My vision is to get the opposite side of each of these samples as well as a half-dozen other species in this genus, perhaps even multiple individual specimens of each species, to allow students to do a lab where they plot morphological changes over geologic time as an example of what the fossil record shows about evolution.
(Credit for making these images goes to my student Robin Rohrback, as usual.)
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.