Some science stuff:

I'm trying to develop a phylogeny lab for my Ecology students to do. It's based loosely on a dichotomous-key construction lab done in the general bio class here, and more tightly on a laboratory I used to do with my basic bio students when I was a grad student (alas, I loaned out my copy of that lab and never got it back). But there are some phylogeny/evolution labs on the Web that are simple enough to do in a couple hours, and can be done without actual animal or bird specimens:

Access Excellence lab using data on lizards
Natural selection and the "Egyptian Origami Bird"

and this one, the one that is most like the lab I remembered (and where I'm getting my supply list from): Principles of Taxonomy lab.

Incidentally, a a McGraw-Hill webpage has a good background on Taxonomic Classification and Phylogeny

The idea for the particular lab is, you give students a baggie full of "biobeasties" (actually nuts, bolts, screws, pushpins...) and they have to figure out relationships between them based on their characteristics. The really neat thing is you can have them test their phylogenies because you can make a "fossil record" of these things using clay (I always told my students the fossils were from the Paleo-Plasticene but they never got the joke....I guess you have to be 'of a certain age' to know that modeling clay can also be called Plasticene).