Biology fossils found in Australia dichotomous keys and palaeontologist Scott Hocknull
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
Discussing the experience of building a dichotomous key of garden plants
The Dichotomous key was fairly simple to understand. The concept of continuous branching until the plant is discovered is easily understood. The dichotomous key was a good method to present information about a small number of organisms. However for more than 10 organisms, the dichotomous key would become much larger and harder to construct. Not only can you find out what the name of an organism is based on characteristics, but you can find the characteristics based on the name by working backwards.
To design a key, the identifying features of plants had to be known. Finding the identifying features of plants proved to be difficult. Using the internet, many of the sites were not consistent with information. Researching for images of actual plants with the identifying features proved to give a better understanding and identification of what the identifying feature should look like. It was much easier to compare collected specimens to other pictures of plants, rather than the word definitions...