Course Policy & General Expectations
About
This is a course on the biology of mammals of the world. It will combine experience from laboratories, lectures, field work, and independent research. The laboratory portion of the course will rely heavily on the mammal collections of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. One major goal is to have students become familiar with the evolutionary diversification of mammals of the world and also with the ecology and evolution of the local mammalian fauna. Students will therefore be expected to learn the defining characteristics of mammalian families worldwide, selected North American genera, and many Arizona species. We will take a phylogenetic perspective and emphasize a functional understanding of the characters that diagnose lineages. You will not simply memorize characters (although there will be considerable memorization), but learn their evolutionary and functional significance. At the end of the course you should be able to place any mammalian specimen (whether or not you have seen it before) to Order and Family, and you should be able to suggest its food habits from an examination of its teeth and jaw structure, or to suggest its locomotory mode (and thus habitat) from an examination of its limb bones. By learning the details of a single adaptive radiation, you will come to appreciate more fully the various mechanisms of the evolutionary process. The lecture portion of the course will be topical (not taxonomic) and will cover a wide range of subjects in the ecology and evolution of mammals. Students will be expected to read from the texts (Feldhamer; Martin) and from the primary literature. There will be one required weekend field trip in southeastern Arizona. Field work is a critical part of the class: we will have the opportunity to observe, handle, and study wild mammals first-hand. This trip is intended to introduce students to the field identification of mammals and techniques used to study their population biology. Finally, students will produce an independent research project on a topic of their choice. This research must be original and may involve field or laboratory studies.