Precambrian
What are cyanobacteria?
One of the following animal groups did NOT evolve during the Paleozoic era: arthropods, molluscs, fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, and synapsids.
What are dinosaurs?
This evolutionary process rapidly created new species and occurred after a mass extinction event from the Permian period.
What is the Great Dying?
This fundamental physics quantity is calculated by multiplying mass by acceleration, and would have been enormous for a charging dinosaur.
What is Force?
What dinosaurs are the first ones the visitors see when they arrive at the park?
What are Brachiosauruses?
Around 2.4 billion years ago, this event dramatically increased atmospheric oxygen levels and fundamentally altered conditions for life on Earth.
What is the Great Oxidation Event?
This tragic event occurred over 250 million years ago and wiped out over 90% of Earth's species, including the beloved trilobite.
What is the Great Dying?
A T. rex weighing approximately 8,000 kg running at 4 m/s² would have generated this much net force (hint: unit is Newtons).
What is 32,000 Newtons?
What breed is the sick dinosaur the visitors come across on their initial tour of Jurassic Park?
What is a triceratops?
These sedimentary rocks are formed by the growth of cyanobacteria and are some of the oldest fossils on Earth, dating nearly 3.5 billion years ago.
What are stromatolites?
This is the Greek meaning of the word "Mesozoic".
What is "middle life"?
A Velociraptor with a mass of 15 kg sprinting at 10 m/s possessed this much kinetic energy.
What is 750 Joules (KE = ½mv²)?
Finish this famous quote from Jeff Goldblum: "Life, uh..."
What is "finds a way?"
Which of the following Spongebob characters was most likely to be alive during the Precambrian Era?
A. Squidward
B. Patrick
C. Spongebob
D. Mr. Krabs
E. Sandy Cheeks
What is Spongebob (Answer C)?
This animal lived during the Paleozoic era, had a tough exoskeleton like a lobster, and Dad loved to give this to us after work trips!
What is a trilobite?
These two ancestral groups dominated the Triassic Period and gave rise to dinosaurs, crocodiles, and eventually birds.
What are therapsids and thecodonts?
This physics principle, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, explains why a Stegosaurus's metabolic energy from food ultimately became heat, motion, and stored chemical energy.
What is the Law of Conservation of Energy?
Fossils discovered in the '90s confirmed that many theropod dinosaurs, including relatives of Velociraptor, were covered in this material — a fact that Jurassic Park's original depictions famously got wrong.
What is feathers?
Scientists hypothesize that this late Precambrian extinction event — which wiped out most soft-bodied Ediacaran organisms around 541 million years ago — was driven by a convergence of factors including the burrowing activity of worm-like animals that disturbed seafloor sediment, shifts in feeding relationships, and broader environmental engineering by evolving animal body plans.
What is the End-Ediacaran Extinction?
This Permian-period animal looks like a dinosaur but is actually a synapsid.
What is a dimetrodon?
These long-necked marine reptiles were apex ocean predators throughout much of the Mesozoic, and are NOT represented on the dining table today.
What are plesiosaurs?
T rexes likely could not run at full sprint because at high speeds the compressive stress on its leg bones would have exceeded this material property — the maximum stress a bone can withstand before fracturing.
What is compressive strength (or ultimate compressive stress)?
How many minutes of actual dinosaur footage are in the final cut of the 1993 film?
What is 15 minutes?