1941 science test shows how things have changed

— -- Some of us might rather forget our old science exams. But sometimes they still have lessons to offer.

For example, take a 1941 exam unearthed by one anatomy professor. The test is a relic of a simpler time that tells us a lot about the evolution of studying evolution.

"I just found the exam in one of my wife's old textbooks," says Casey Holliday of Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. Folded inside a copy of the 1937 Man and the Vertebrates by Alfred Romer (a sage in reptile anatomy circles), the acetate copy of a 13-question "Zoology 1B" exam, dated May 9, 1941, intrigued Holliday.

"Some things haven't changed, these are still questions we'd ask in an introductory class," he says. A little detective work with the names stamped inside the book suggest the test (or perhaps an exam review) was given by UCLA professor E. L. Lazier on that date to his students. At the time, biologists knew that fossil evidence showed that new species evolved from older ones, sharing many of their characteristics, but the discovery of DNA was still 12 years away.

"What they had were fossils, and the system of classifying species we still use today," Holliday says. The first nine questions of the exam could appears on tests today with the same answers, he says. "A lot of memorization, just knowing the different classes of species, that's no different that what I ask students on my exams."

Lampreys and hagfish, jawless fish belonging to an ancient class called Agnatha figure in the exam, and are still often discussed in evolutionary biology, for example, where researchers debate the evolution of the jaw, necessary for eating all sorts of food.