Preserved remains or traces of living things. Forms when living things die and are buried by sediments. Typically only hard parts of the living things are preserved.
What are fossils?
100
Living things in an ecosystem that affect the rest of the ecosystem.
What are biotic factors?
100
A precise estimate of exactly how many years have passed since the rock was formed.
What is the absolute age of a rock?
100
A rock's age in comparison to the ages of other rocks and fossils around it.
What is the relative age of a rock?
100
An increase in the vertical elevation of land, caused by plate tectonics.
What is uplift?
200
A hollow area in a sedimentary rock in the inverted shape of an organism or part of an organism.
What is a mold?
200
The theory that says that all the continents were once joined together in a super-continent called Pangaea.
What is the Theory of Continental Drift?
200
Analyzing percentages of radioactive isotopes within a rock sample to estimate how long it has been since it formed.
What is radioactive dating?
200
The fossil of a plant or animal that existed worldwide, but only during a specific geologic time period.
What is an index fossil?
200
The process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth.
What is evolution?
300
Footprints, trails, and burrows are all examples of this type of fossil.
What are trace fossils?
300
Cylinders of ice drilled out and removed from glaciers and polar ice sheets. Can hold pollen, sulfur, dust, ash, radioactive elements, trace metals, and amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide that can be used to help predict how the climate has changed.
What is an ice core?
300
Atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons.
What are isotopes?
300
A surface where new rock layers meet a much older rock surface beneath them.
What is an unconformity?
300
A very rare type of fossil where an organism's remains is preserved with little or no change, and can be formed when an organism is quickly enclosed in tar, amber, or ice.
What are preserved remains?
400
The type of rock that fossils are most commonly found in.
What is Sedimentary Rock?
400
This type of gas found trapped in ice cores can reveal the abundance of wetlands on Earth.
What is methane?
400
The type of rock that paleontologists cannot estimate the absolute age of.
What is sedimentary rock?
400
4 things that can help cause unconformities.
What is uplift, folding, erosion, and deposition?
400
When unstable atoms lose particles and energy.
What is radioactive decay?
500
The 6 different types of fossils.
What are molds, casts, petrified fossils, carbon films, trace fossils, and preserved remains?
500
Types of fossils found on a continent can reveal a lot about these two things.
What is the former location and climate?
500
The time it takes for 1/2 of the radioactive atoms to decay.
What is half-life?
500
The law that states that "In horizontal sedimentary rock layers, the oldest layer is at the bottom and each layer is younger than the layer below it."
What is The Law of Superposition
500
9 examples of abiotic factors.
What is water, air, gravity, weather, temperature, light, earthquakes, volcanoes, and plate tectonics?