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Educational geoscience games have been increasing in popularity because they promote learning through amusement and encourage students to engage with topical material and each other. Here we describe a new board game, “Reef Survivor”, and its use as an instructional tool in undergraduate classes. The educational objective is to teach players about ecology, evolution, and environmental perturbations, while the gameplay objective is to build a resilient reef ecosystem. Through collaborative and competitive gameplay, students learn about evolution mechanics—mutation, migration, and natural selection—as well as ecology and how reefs survive natural disasters. The game blends informed decision making and chance to encourage students to learn and model complex Earth systems and evolutionary processes. Students choose their environment and reef community, whereas chance influences mutations and disasters. The game was incorporated in undergraduate classroom activities in 2021 and 2022 at 20 colleges and universities, mostly public institutions in the United States. Students were enthusiastic about the game, with two thirds saying they would rather play the game than have a normal lab. Notably, students said playing with a peer helped them learn better. Taken together, learning gains from 15 institutions were pos­itive, with significant gains by the final semester of assess­ment. Overall, learning gains were not positive during the first deployment (online) but improved substantially when refined and played in person. A print-and-play version of the game (doi: 10.18738/T8/S3KWT7), onboarding and follow-up assignments, and suggested extension activities are provided; modifications for time, course objective, and edu­cational level are also discussed. 

Abstract Konservat-Lagerstätten—deposits with exceptionally preserved fossils—vary in abundance across geographic and stratigraphic space due to paleoenvironmental heterogeneity. While oceanic anoxic events (OAEs) may have promoted preservation of marine lagerstätten, the environmental controls on their taphonomy remain unclear. Here, we provide new data on the mineralization of fossils in three Lower Jurassic Lagerstätten—Strawberry Bank (UK), Ya Ha Tinda (Canada), and Posidonia Shale (Germany) —and test the hypothesis that they were preserved under similar conditions. Biostratigraphy indicates that all three Lagerstätten were deposited during the Toarcian OAE (TOAE), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) show that each deposit contains a variety of taxa preserved as phosphatized skeletons and tissues. Thus, despite their geographic and paleoenvironmental differences, all of these Lagerstätten were deposited in settings conducive to phosphatization, indicating that the TOAE fostered exceptional preservation in marine settings around the world. Phosphatization may have been fueled by phosphate delivery from climatically-driven sea level change and continental weathering, with anoxic basins acting as phosphorus traps.