Sedimentary
The sedimentary layer on the bottom is the oldest, and the layer on top is the youngest.
What is the Law of Superposition?
The gas that caused Banded Iron Formations to form.
What is oxygen?
The two Earth systems that interact when volcanoes erupt carbon dioxide, which warms the climate.
What are the geosphere and atmosphere?
A better name than Cambrian "Explosion."
What is an adaptive radiation?
Fossilized tracks, trails, burrows, nests, and dung.
What are trace fossils?
The sedimentary rock that is deposited in a river environment.
What is conglomerate?
The oldest accepted multicellular eukaryote.
What is Bangiomorpha?
Long-term weather for the world. Example: increasing global temperatures compared with long-term averages.
What is climate?
The Taconic Orogeny.
What was the first Appalachian orogeny (in the Ordovician)?
Marine animals that live on sediment.
What is epifaunal?
The sedimentary environment that produces breccia.
What is an alluvial fan?
Alternating layers of photosynthetic cyanobacteria and sediment.
What are stromatolites?
An example of feedback: ice reflects sunlight, which cools the climate, which makes more ice, which cools more…..and on and on.
What is a positive feedback loop?
The first transgression of the Paleozoic Era.
What was the Sauk?
The 36 (or so) major types of animal life.
What are phyla?
Beaches and deserts.
What are two sedimentary environments that produce sandstone?
Rodinia.
What was the first supercontinent in the Proterozoic?
The two Earth systems that interact when a continent splits, causing allopatric speciation.
What are the geosphere and biosphere?
The Paleozoic Period in which trilobites enjoyed the highest diversity of species.
What was the Ordovician?
Animals with a notochord at some point in their development.
What is a chordate?
Rounding and sorting.
What are the two things that happen to clastic sedimentary particles?
Rocks formed on land that show evidence of abundant free oxygen in the atmosphere.
What are continental red beds?
Sedimentary evidence for the "Snowball Earth" episodes.
What are tillites? (even near the Proterozoic equator)
The first land animals, also known as "sea scorpions."
What were eurypterids?
When humans breed animals or plants to bring out a particular physical or behavioral trait.
What is artificial selection?