Optional Activities
Additional Activities
- Flower Dissection: Find a simple flower (lily, tulip, or grocery store flower) and carefully pull it apart to identify the petals, stamens, pistil, and pollen. Connect each part to its role in attracting pollinators and producing seeds, just as Cretaceous flowers did 100 million years ago.
- Seed Dispersal Sort: Gather 6–8 different seeds (dandelion puff, burr, acorn, cherry pit, maple “helicopter”). For each, determine its dispersal method: wind, animal (eaten), animal (stuck to fur), water, or mechanical. Draw and label each strategy.
- Pollinator Watch: Spend 10 minutes near flowering plants and count how many different insect or bird visitors you observe. Record what they do on each flower. You’re watching a partnership that began 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous.
- Angiosperm vs Gymnosperm: Research the differences in reproduction between flowering plants (angiosperms) and conifers/cycads (gymnosperms). Why did angiosperms outcompete gymnosperms in most environments? What environments do gymnosperms still dominate?
- Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery”: Darwin called the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record an “abominable mystery.” It still isn’t fully solved. Research current hypotheses. Was it the rapid co-evolution with insects? Genome changes? Write a short paragraph explaining the leading ideas.