Course Format: Lecture: 11:15-12:05 MW, JH124 plus one laboratory
session per week on M or T in JH 243.

Requirements:  An introductory biology course.

Course Description:  For full, illustrated information see:
http://www.bio.indiana.edu/courses/B300-Gastony/index.html. This is a
remarkably well organized and informative course with excellent and
caring AIs. The professor received the 2001 Senior Class Award for
Teaching Excellence in Biology and Dedication to Undergraduates.
Vascular plants are commonly known as the "higher plants" and are the
dominant plants in the world today, those that we constantly see
around us in the natural world and those that we cultivate and use for
landscaping, house plants and food.  Course focuses on the major kinds
or groups of extant vascular plants and studies in detail and from an
evolutionary perspective the morphologies, life cycles,
identification, classification, and economic importance of these
groups.  Laboratory sessions and one spring field trip provide
hands-on experience in analyzing plant structures, using
identification keys, preparing and working with herbarium specimens,
and reconstructing  phylogenetic relationships among plant groups with
and without computer assistance.  In a semester-long lab project, the
life cycle of a fern is examined from the sowing of spores to
fertilization in gametophytes and the early development of
sporophytes.  The course progresses from groups most like the earliest
evolved land plants to the most recently evolved major group, the
angiosperms or flowering plants that dominate most of the earth's land
surface today.  Approximately the first third of the course deals with
the earliest evolving extant vascular plants (the whisk ferns,
clubmosses, spike mosses, quillworts, horsetails, and ferns),
concluding with the more primitive lineages of seed-producing plants
(the gymnosperms such as the cycads, Ginkgo, and pines).  The final
two thirds of the course are devoted to the flowering plants, with
lectures covering their reproductive biology (flower types, fruit
types, life cycle, etc.) and other shared characteristics as well as
the taxonomy, identification, economic importance, and other features
of some of their most important and commonly encountered families.

Required text: "Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach", second
edition. By Judd, et al.  Published by Sinauer Associates. Selected
journal articles will also be assigned.  Laboratory manual consists of
bound xeroxed lab exercises designed for this course.

Weekly assignments:  Read relevant pages from the text and study
lecture notes. Occasional web exercises.

Exams/Papers:  Occasional pop quizzes with lowest quiz score dropped;
three lecture exams; three laboratory practical exams; all exams count.