Fossil Fundamentals
These are preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the past.
What are fossils?
If you find an animal perfectly preserved with skin, hair, and organs in a snowy mountain, it was preserved by this process.
Out of dinosaur bones, petrified wood, amber, and footprints, this is the only trace fossil.
What are footprints?
Organisms found in the same layer of geologic column did this.
What is lived at the same time?
What is the Cenozoic Era?
This term describes the end of a group of organisms, usually a species.
What is extinction?
This famous scientist is known for his work on natural selection.
Who is Charles Darwin?
Choosing plants with specific traits to breed next season, life wanting to grow bigger and juicier tomatoes, is called this.
What is selective breeding?
Most fossil remains are made of hard structures like these.
What are bones and teeth?
Footprints and burrows left by ancient animals provide this type of fossil evidence about life in the past.
What is indirect evidence of life in the form of trace fossils?
Finding marine fossils in rock layers means those layers were once covered by this.
What is water?
Given layers with early horses at the top, dinosaurs next, armored fish next, and trilobites on the bottom, these creatures lived the longest time ago.
What are trilobites?
Scientists organize Earth's history using rock strata and this record.
What is the fossil record?
Fossil evidence helps support this theory about landmasses driffing apart.
What is Continental Drift?
A body part, feature, or behavior that helps a living thing survive and function better in its environment, such as thick fur, is called this.
What is adaptation?
Selective breeding differs from natural selection because it only occurs when these intervene.
Who are humans?
This is the type of rock in which fossils are most commonly found.
What are sedimentary rocks?
Evaporation is NOT a type of this process.
What is fossilization?
The fossil record can teach us when organisms lived and how they did this.
What is changed or evolved?
This scientific law states that newer soil layers are on top of older ones unless disturbed.
What is the law of superposition?
Dinosaurs, birds, and flowering plants became more complex during this era.
What is the Mesozoic Era?
A person in this profession studies fossil remains to learn about primitive life forms.
What is a paleontologist?
Darwin studied these birds on the Galapagos Islands.
What are finches?
The main purpose of adding foreign DNA to GMOs is to introduce this.
What is a beneficial trait?
Paleontology is the study of these.
What are fossils?
The two main types of petrification are replacement and this process.
What is permineralization?
Finding the same fossils on different continents suggests the landmasses were once one of these.
To determine the relative age of fossils in different rock layers, you can examine the age of these.
What are rock layers (or strata)?
What is the Paleozoic Era?
The development of large mammals and human beings happened during this era.
What is the Cenozoic Era?
Through adaptation in the Galapogos Islands, finches developed this distinctive feature to help them eat.
What are beaks?
An example of a genetically modified crop is corn that has this introduced trait.
What is insect resistance?
For a fish skeleton to become a fossil, this specific condition is needed.
What is quick burial of the organism?
During replacement, water dissolves the original material and replaces it with these.
What are minerals?
A key characteristic of index fossils is that they are easily this.
To understand Earth's geological history, scientists use relative dating and this other dating method.
What is absolute dating?
The Precambrian time makes up this massive percentage of Earth's history.
What is 88%?
This major event happened at the end of the Paleozoic Era.
What is mass extinction?
This process explains how some animals survive and reproduce better than others.
What is natural selection?
This type of DNA is introduced into genetically modifed organisms (GMOs).
What is foreign DNA?
When erosion and uplifting occur, fossils are exposed to this.
What is the Earth's surface?
During permineralization, groundwater carries dissolved minerals in the pores of these.
Radiometric dating helps find the age of rocks and relies on this property?
What is half-life?
The oldest fossils are of stromatolites, which are this many years old.
What is 3.5 billion years old?
Earth has experience this many major mass extinctions.
What is 5?
What is survive and produce more offspring?
In a population of rabbits, it takes this relative amount of time for favorable traits like faster running to become common.
What is a long period of time?