Living Things and Fossils
These 8 traits are shared by all living things
What are being made of cells, using energy, growing/developing, responding to environment, reproducing, having DNA/RNA, maintaining homeostasis, and evolving?
Before radiometric dating, fossils were dated by looking at these rock layers.
What are sedimentary rock layers?
Similar bone structure in humans, bats, and cows show this.
What are homologous structures?
The biological species concept requires that organisms produce these.
What are fertile offspring?
This term describes a genetic trait that increases an organism's chances of surviving and reproducing in its environment.
What is an adaptive trait?
A preserved trace or remains of an organism is called this.
What is a fossil?
This dating method measures the decay of isotopes in volcanic rock layers around fossils to determine their actual age.
What is radiometric dating?
Structures with the same function but different ancestry, like incest and bat wings.
What are analogous structures?
When horse + donkey = mule, they fail this test for being the same species.
What is producing fertile offspring?
When individuals of the same species compete for resources.
What is intraspecific competition?
Fossils like footprints and burrows show not remains, but these.
What are traces?
Fish appearing in deeper rock layers than salamanders means this.
What is fish evolved before salamanders?
Human ear muscles and snake pelvis bones are examples of these leftover structures?
What are vestigial structures?
Two times the species concept doesn't work.
What are fossils and asexual organisms?
Breeding crops or animals by choosing traits is this process.
What is artificial selection?
These organisms are not considered alive because they aren't made of cells and can't reproduce on their own.
What are viruses?
Fossils of extinct animals that show traits linking two groups are called this.
What are transitional forms (missing links)?
These early-stage similarities provide hidden evidence of ancestry.
What is embryology (similar embryos)?
The science of naming/classifying organisms.
What is taxonomy?
The selecting agent in natural selection is this.
What is the environment?
Two major fossil record patterns are species disappearing and new species appearing.
What are extinction and origin of new species?
Humans and dinosaurs could not have lived together because of this fossil evidence.
What is that human fossils appear much later than dinosaur fossils?
Comparing DNA and proteins helps show this relationship.
What is common ancestry?
This field combines taxonomy with evolutionary history.
What is systematics?
Fitness is measured not by survival, but by this.
What is reproductive success (number of offspring)?