Educational Board Games!

My Ph.D. Student Anna Weiss and I are developing an educational board game about fossilization. The game is called "Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized". 

Through competitive play, game players learn about taphonomy (i.e., processes that affect an organism as it fossilizes) and how biology, environment, physical and chemical changes during exposure, burial, and decomposition, as well as discovery biases influence whether or not an organism is collected. Players attempt to preserve the best fossil collection by “time traveling” to the Jurassic; there they protect their specimens from taphonomic factors (either from random environmental events or other players) and learn what processes enhance or diminish preservation. Players then return to the present to recovery their specimens and learn that collection also biases sample recovery.

"Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized" is modeled after the Ya Ha Tinda Lagerstätte, an Early Jurassic-aged fossil deposit in Canada. If you want to learn more about the site this game is based on, I gave a public talk about the site at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. Link here: https://findingfossils.blogspot.com/2018/03/RTMP-talk-2018.html

The game was debuted at the 2018 GSA Annual Meeting and is currently being tested in undergraduate classrooms across the United States. For more information, check out the game website here: www.jsg.utexas.edu/martindale/paleontological-board-games/