From your roomate’s goldfish to the trout in Cayuga Lake; for Prof. Amy McCune, ecology and evolutionary biology, these ordinary specimens provide a glimpse at a world of great diversity. 

While water covers over 70 percent of the earth, land life is 300 times more diverse than sea life. However, the ocean has a wide diversity of species. On Wednesday, in “Evolution and Biodiversity of the Sea,” panelists examined the threat of climate change on the biodiversity of the sea.

In school, Doug Erwin trained to think like a snail. This isn’t an insult to the his mind; it’s a tribute to his ability to think in tens of millions of years. He is a senior scientist, the curator at the Smithsonian Institution, and the president of The Paleontological Society.

On Tuesday, panelists discussed the topic, “Evolution and Biodiversity on Land.” The goal, as moderator Prof. Warren D. Allmon, earth and atmospheric science, said, was to make Cornell expertise available to a wider audience, to go beyond the “buzz word” connotations of biodiversity and to examine what biodiversity really means.