Vocabulary
The remains or traces of a plant or animal that lived long ago
What is a fossil?
When an insect gets trapped in tree sap
What is amber fossil?
Name three types of fossils
What is amber, mold, cast, body, frozen in ice, trace etc.
Type of rock are fossils usually found in
What is sedimentary rock?
What is the name of the scientist who studies fossils?
What is paleontologist?
An impression of an organism, formed when sediment hardens around the organism
What is an Mold?
What are footprints, nests, feces, bite or claw marks
What is a trace fossil?
Describe a mold fossil
What is an imprint or impression into soft mud, sand or dirt. It then hardens to make a hollow space fossil.
Where can the oldest layer or fossils be found?
What is the bottom?
Most fossils are made of hard parts; bones, shells or teeth. The soft parts such as skin, organs eyes and muscles are rarely preserved as fossils. Why is this so?
Soft parts are very easily eaten by predators or decomposed by bacteria. Over time, it is the hard parts that are left behind.
A period in which a large number of species become extinct.
What is mass extinction?
A type of fossil that has a hollow space
What is mold fossil.
Describe a cast fossil
What is when sediment fills a mold and creates almost a 3D effect. It then hardens into a fossil.
Long ago, all of Earth’s land was joined together as one giant continent. What was it called, and what evidence do scientists use to know this?
What is Pangaea?
1. Same rock layers/mountains found across ocean
2. Same fossils- of organism that can not swim, found across ocean.
3. The continents look like a puzzle piece
Name the four possible causes of mass extinction
1. Volcanic Eruption 2. Drought 3. Flood 4. Meteor
A fossil of a type of organism that lived in many places during a relatively short time span.
What is index fossil?
What is petrified wood and how does it form?
A peice of wood that has turn to stone by minerals replacing material in a peice of wood?
What is the name of the organism that has a exoskeleton and a three body segment and any of numerous flat spiral fossil shells ?
What is trilobite and ammonite?
Name two Eras and the life forms they are known for.
What is the
Cenozoic Era- age of mammals
Mesozoic Era- age of dinosaurs
Paleozoic Era- age of fish
Precambrian Age- first life on Earth
All of the fossils in Earth's rock layers. The fossils are then compared by- older, younger, or the same.
What is relative age?
A model of an organism, formed when sediment fills a mold and hardens
What is a cast?
These are two ways to preserve a whole organism as a fossil.
What are amber or ice?
Name the steps to fossil formation
What is
1. Organism dies and settles at the bottom of a body of water
2. Sediment buries organism
3. Hard parts preserve in sediment as a fossil
Name ALL four requirements to be an index fossil.
What is
1. Lived during a short period of time
2. had a large population
3. widespread
4. easily recognized
A chart that divides Earth's history into units? Name ALL four units in time.
What is the geologic time scale?
Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic