Fossils
This fossil is a hollow area in the shape of an animal/plant left behind.
What is a mold/cast fossil?
This is the usual order of rock strata.
What is the oldest layers are on the bottom and younger layers are on top?
This is what scientists were able to create by studying rock strata.
What is the geologic time scale?
This is the name of the key bed that was formed from a meteoroid impact at the end of the Mesozoic era.
What is the K-T Boundary?
This is an organism that does not have a backbone.
What is an invertebrate?
This is why scientists use radar to help them locate fossils underground without digging.
What is because fossils reflect the radar radio waves differently than the surrounding rock?
This is something that can cause the order of rock strata to change.
What is movement along the fault lines, movement of magma under Earth's surface, or heat and pressure?
This is what had to have occurred in order to create a key bed.
What is a mass extinction event?
This is the sequence of events that happen in order to create a fossil of a fish.
What is sediments are deposited on the ocean floor, then a fish dies and falls to the ocean floor, it is then covered in more sediment, then the soft tissues decay and leave behind the bones, the sediments harden into rock layers over millions of years, finally minerals replace the hard tissues of bones.
This animal lives part of its life on land and part on water.
What is an amphibian?
This is how fossils can tell you about the environment where an animal lived.
What is their bones and body structures help give clues about how they survived? For example, claws and sharp teeth mean predator, fins and small teeth mean water animals.
This is what scientists pull from the rock strata to tell the age of the ground without digging it up.
What is a core sample?
Identical index fossils are found in a rock layer in the Grand Canyon and in Utah (675 miles away). What can the scientist infer about the ages of the two rock layers?
What is they are about the same age?
This is the type of fossil formed when a frog dies and falls into a shallow lake where it is rapidly buried in the sediments that changes to rock over millions of years.
What is body fossil?
This animal has a backbone.
What is a vertebrate?
This is what you call a fossil of a footprint.
What is a trace fossil?
This is how long ago the dinosaurs died out.
What is around 65 - 66 million year ago?
This is what is used by geologists to correlate rock ages from different locations.
What is key beds and index fossils?
This is how a farmer in Oklahoma might discover a fossil of a sea creature in the middle of his farm.
What is his farm was once covered by an ocean millions of years ago?
This animal has hair and gives birth to live young.
What is a mammal?
This is the fossil of dinosaur bones.
What is a bone fossil?
This is the age range that the rock strata is if Trilobites are found in it.
What is between 521 and 250 million years old?
This is how scientists might know that two horizontal rock layers are different ages.
What is by looking at index fossils in the rock layers?
This is what scientists discovered in key bed layers all over the Earth that led them to believe that an asteroid impact killed off all dinosaurs.
What is iridium, which is an element found only in objects from outer space?
This is the current animal that a trilobite is an ancestor of.
What is a horseshoe crab?