Show:
Evolutionary Relationships
Adaptations, variation, and isolation
Natural Selection
Earth's history
Rocks and fossils
100
The process of how organisms acquire adaptations over time is called this.
What is evolution
100
This is an inherited trait that helps an organism survive.
What is an adaptation?
100
In order for natural selection to occur populations must do this.
What is over-reproduce?
100
The geologic time scale is divided into these two main categories.
What are eras and periods?
100
A method of ordering events relative to each other
What is relative dating?
200
All living things have this in their cells, suggesting a common ancestor.
What is DNA?
200
As a populations’ habitat changes over time, a species with a high level of variation would have this.
What is a better chance of survival?
200
Darwin concluded that the mechanism for evolution is this.
What is natural selection?
200
This was the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history
What is the Permian extinction?
200
This is the amount of time it takes for half of the unstable atoms in a sample to decay.
What is a half-life?
300
Each branch of a cladogram represents this.
What are different evolutionary paths?
300
This is how mutations occur in an organism, and how they affect a population.
What is they occur randomly and lead to greater variation?
300
The climate of a certain area is cold, and snow is found on the ground most of the year. Equal numbers of two populations of rabbits are introduced into this climate by a group of scientists. One of the populations is brown and the other is white. Over several generations, this will happen.
There will be more white rabbits than brown rabbits
300
Alfred Wegener theorized that the continents were once a great landmass that he named this.
What is Pangaea?
300
This principle states that the layers of sedimentary rocks that are the “lowest” are the earliest to be deposited.
What is the principle of superposition?
400
Species that share more similarities in their DNA are _____ than those that share fewer similarities.
What is "closely related"?
400
Populations with many variations have a better chance of survival than a population with little or no variations when this happens.
What is a change in the environment?
400
List the four steps of natural selection
What is over-reproduction, variation, favorable adaptations are selected, favorable adaptations accumulate
400
The theory of plate tectonics describes this.
How do continents move?
400
Explain how relative dating of fossils differs from absolute dating of fossils.
Relative dating just gives a general order, absolute dating gives an age in years
500
Over 90% of the DNA base sequences for hemoglobin in chimpanzees and humans are identical, suggesting this.
What is that the two species share a common ancestor?
500
The separation of the continents through plate tectonics result in new species because _____.
What is once a population becomes separated they can no longer breed, so the separated populations evolve differently and eventually become different species?
500
Explain how Darwin’s observations of finches in the Galapagos Islands led to his ideas about natural selection.
-Finches on the islands were slightly different from those found on the mainland. --Slight differences in finches from island to island. -Beak shape. --Based on the type of food eaten; finches were adapted for the type of food they ate. -Darwin hypothesized that an ancestral species of finch from the mainland ended up on the Galapagos, and the finches were scattered to different environments. --Then, had to adapt to different conditions, and over many generations evolved into new species.
500
Give 3 pieces of evidence to support Wegener’s theory that today’s continents were once part of an earlier supercontinent.
Similar fossils, similar geologic features, they fit like a puzzle
500
Fossils found in the lowest layers of undisturbed rock are not found in upper layers of the same undisturbed rock. Explain what happened to the species found in the lower rock layers and why this might have happened.
The earlier species became extinct. The changing environments on Earth causing loss of habitat, increased competition, new predators, or catastrophes. Lack of genetic variation within a species.