Scientific Inquiry

Professor Philip Johns

In the introductory module Dogs as Model Organisms (DMO), students participated in a multi-week exercise that entailed measuring plastic casts of various wild felid and canid (cat and dog) skulls. Students measured, compared, and ultimately tested their own hypotheses on about 20 plastic skulls ranging from house cats to saber-toothed tigers, and from arctic foxes to dire wolves (see featured image). To test their hypotheses, students had to think about their comparisons quantitatively, and then connect those quantitative relationships to broader ideas.

Further, students in SI1 do a separate exercise with plastic hominid (ape and human) skulls, where students measure different features to test hypotheses about the evolution of human brain size.