We started the Paleontology module from a broad perspective, making sure to cover a brief history of life on earth as well as the history of evolutionary theory, including the work of such academic greats as Mayr, Simpson, and Dobzhansky. With such a solid base under our belts, we can now start learning mammalian anatomy! To [...]
Map of the Koobi Fora Region As an educational and celebratory culmination to the geology module, we went on a geology-based camping trip to the Koobi Fora region, particularly close to where Richard Leakey established the Koobi Fora Base Camp in 1968. In the early 1970s Richard and Meave Leakey led a crew [...]
Throughout the history of the Turkana Basin, the dominant hydrographic systems that have fluctuated throughout the basin have been fluvial and lacustrine systems. While this fluctuating environment has been a main theme throughout most of the Geology module, students are now turning to studying current day environments to better understand sediment accumulation in past environments. While [...]
For this module, titled Sedimentary Geology and Geochronology of the Turkana Basin, Professor R. Linda Martin will be leading the students back in time as we reconstruct the past landscapes of the Turkana Basin. Professor Martin is currently the Academic Director for the Origins Field School and has been conducting research in the Turkana Basin since 2011. [...]
One of the final concepts we learned about in ecology was the relationships between organisms. Specifically, the relationship between intimacy (a measurement of the proximity in which these animals interact) and lethality (how harmful the relationship is). For example, a lion and a zebra would have low intimacy and high lethality, because they spend very [...]
On Tuesday, the field school explored near the edge of Sibiloi National Park to learn more about adaptive strategies of vegetation in such an arid environment. In particular, we focused on the desert rose, Adenium obesum, a rather amazing tree. The desert rose is an incredibly slow growing tree, growing an average of 1 millimeter [...]
The field school spent a few days learning about vectors, parasites, and the effect they have on people and the communities in the Turkana Basin. A vector is an animal that actively or passively transmits a pathogen from one organism to another; the most obvious example would be the mosquito, whose diverse family is known [...]
On Monday and Tuesday, we had the opportunity to learn from Mpala researcher Kimani Ndung'u who specializes in vegetation studies and is currently investigating the effects of termite mounds on the locale-specific environment. He is also a part of a project (www.forestgeo.si.edu/site/mpala) run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute where they are collecting data for the only savannah plot in their global network. [...]