From Newsroom to Classroom

Want a great example of evolution for your classroom? If we are guided by our textbooks, we should look to the radiation of Darwin’s finches (Grant and Grant 2008), the return of whales to the water (Thewissen 1998), the evolution of modern horses from their tiny ancestors (MacFadden 2005), or some similar well-established example for a case study. But are these sorts of illustrations the most compelling to students? Though such classic examples of evolution have more than earned their keep in the biology classroom, they are also removed from students’ everyday lives. Hyracotherium, for example, may fascinate some students but leave others wondering why they need to know this stuff. Just how relevant is a 50-million-year-old horse to a 14-year-old’s fastpaced media-driven world? For this curriculum-themed issue, “Views from Understanding Evolution” departs from our usual format to introduce Evo in the News (Fig. 1)—a collaborative project of the UC Museum of Paleontology and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). Evo in the News aims to help high school and college teachers bring current and relevant examples of evolution and evolutionary research into their classrooms to help teach basic concepts in evolutionary biology. Archives are freely available on the Understanding Evolution website (http://evolution.berkeley. edu/), and the latest updates can be received via a free subscription service (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/ subscribe/email_signup.php).