Geologic Timescale
These are the three main Eras, in order.
What are the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic Eras?
These are the three extant mammalian lineages - commonly known as monotremes, marsupials, and placentals.
What are Prototheria, Metatheria, and Eutheria?
Costal ventilation is linked to the evolution of this skull attribute.
Maxilloturbinates emerged in what lineage as evidence of endothermy?
What are therpasids?
This term - meaning "four-footed" - encompasses all extinct and extant descendants of Lissamphibia, Sauropsids, and Synapsids.
What is "tetrapod"?
These are the periods of the Paleozoic era (in order from earliest to most recent).
What are the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian periods?
This is class Mammalia.
All the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of the three major lineages of living mammals, including extinct lineages.
This synapsid character was decreasing after the End Permian extinction.
What is body size?
Aerobic capacity, parental care, and niche expansion are all hypotheses for this trait.
What is endothermy?
This is the Paleozoic period where the earliest known tetrapod fossils are from (bonus points for the date).
What is the late Devonian? And When was 360 MA?
This is the age of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (___ million years ago).
This is a group of organisms that includes an ancestor and all its extant/extinct descendants.
What is a monophyletic group?
The malleus and incus are derived from these bones.
What is the articular and the quadrate?
Costal ventilation, the mesotarsal joint, and amniotic egg are all synapomorphies of this group.
What are amniotes?
This is the Paleozoic period when Amniotes emerged.
What is the late Devonian?
What is the Carboniferous period?
Any species descended from the last common ancestor of extant mammals.
What is "crown-group Mammalia"?
This circuit supplies deoxygenated blood to the lungs.
What is the pulmonary circuit?
Hair originated in this group primarily as a sensory mechanism.
What are cynodonts?
This is the mechanism for the evolution of autopods in tetrapods.
What is a developmental regulatory gene?
This period is when sauropsids (dinosaurs) replaced synapsisds as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates.
What is the Triassic period?
This is a key mechanism driving the evolutionary processes of radiation, speciation, and diversification.
What is continental drift?
Small vibrations in the malleus generates larger vibrations in the stapes in a process known as this.
What is impedance matching?
This is the first lineage to radiate widely in terrestrial habitats.
What are synapsids?
These are the mammalian evolutionary groups in order from most ancestral to most derived.
What are the tetrapods, amniotes, synapsids, eupelycasaurs, therapsids, and cynodonts?