The Geologic Record
The era that saw the Cretacious, Jurassic, and Triassic periods.
What is the Mesozoic era?
This mass extinction took out 96% of marine species.
What is the Permian extinction?
A class of homeotic genes that provide positional information during animal embryonic development.
The most narrow taxonomic group.
What are "species"?
Are found in a single copy in the genome and are homologous between species.
What are orthologous genes?
What is the Cambrian period?
The rapid evolution of diversely adapted species from a common ancestor.
What is adaptive radiation?
The broadest taxonomic group.
What is a domain?
An evolutionary novelty unique to a particular clade. *aka: our modern interpretation of homology
What are synapomorphies? (or: shared derived character)
What is the Silurian period?
An evolutionary change in the rate or timing of developmental events.
What is heterochrony?
What is a basal taxon?
A taxonomic unit at any level of hierarchy.
What is a taxon?
Assumes that the tree that requires the fewest evolutionary events is the most likely phylogenetic hypothesis.
What is maximum parsimony?
When diverse algae and soft-bodied invertebrate animals appeared.
What was the Proterozoic eon/Neoproterozoic era/Ediacaran period?
The evolutionary history of a species or group of related species, often depicted in a tree-like graph.
Analogous structures or molecular sequences that evolved independently.
What are homoplasies?
The man who published a system of taxonomy based on resemblances.
Carolus Linnaeus
States that, given the certain rules about how DNA changes over time, a tree can be found that reflects the most likely sequence of evolutionary events.
What is maximum likelihood?
The epoch in which the appearance of bipedal human ancestors were first seen.
What is the Pilocene epoch?
The earliest mass extinction and when this event took place.
What is the Ordivician extinction (445 mya)?
This group consists of an ancestral species and some, but NOT all, of the descendants.
What is a paraphyletic group?
The names of the first and second terms of binomial nomenclature.
What is "genus" and "specific epithet"?
Uses the constant rates of evolution in some genes to estimate the absolute time of evolutionary change.
What are molecular clocks?