A photo posted by Ted Daeschler (@teddaeschler) on Apr 18, 2015 at 12:29pm PDT
On a beautiful spring day, it’s not unusual for college students to ask to hold class outside. But this spring term, Ted Daeschler’s GEO 103 class, “Intro to Field Methods in Earth Science,” is all outdoors, all the time. The class, which meets on Saturdays, ventures to a different location in the greater Philadelphia region for each session to show students applied methods for studying Earth’s distant past.
And it’s also on Instagram.
Daeschler, a nationally known scientific figure for his co-discovery of the famous transitional fish fossil Tiktaalik roseae, got a smartphone and joined Instagram as a way to connect his students in Drexel’s Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science to the world of geology.
“You can step out anywhere on Earth and there’s something of geological interest,” Daeschler said. “That’s what I want students to get when they see these things.”
Follow Daeschler on Instagram @teddaeschler for inspiring and educational photos of geological formations, fossils and field photos from Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic, where Tiktaalik was discovered.
See Tiktaalik fossils on display in Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University for the final time before their return to Canada, May 2-June 7, 2015.