Cosmic and Earth origins
This is the age of the Earth and our solar system
What is 4.6 billion years old?
The earliest life found on Earth is dated back to this many years ago.
What is 3.5 billion years?
What is 66 million years ago?
What is binary fission?
This is the woman who first proposed the modern theory of endosymbiogenesis in 1967.
Who is Lynn Margulis?
This oceanic tectonic feature is created when new crust is formed as plates pull apart.
What is a mid-oceanic ridge?
This is when the Permian Period began.
What is 299 million years ago?
The three periods of the Mesozoic Era in chronological order from oldest to youngest.
This is how many times multicellularity has evolved independently across eukaryotic lineages. (at least)
What is 25 times?
This is the organelle that evolved first via endosymbiosis. (Hint: the mitochondion or the chloroplast?)
What is the mitochondrion?
What is 13.8 billion years ago?
These are layered sedimentary microbialite formations that are created by photosynthesizing microorganisms.
What are stromatolites?
This is when the Cambrian Period (and Paleozoic Era) began.
This is the cellular organelle that evolved from an engulfed photosynthetic cyanobacterium.
What is a chloroplast?
This is the benchmark date that marks the start of the Ediacaran Period.
What is 635 million years ago?
This geological feature is formed when an oceanic plate sinks beneath another plate back into the mantle.
What is a subduction trench?
This is when the Great Oxygenation Event took place.
What is 2.3 billion years ago?
It is in this famous fossil location in British Columbia, Canada, that soft-bodied animals of the Middle Cambrian are preserved.
What is the Burgess Shale?
These are the 3 fundamental molecular traits shared by all cellular life pointing to LUCA.
What are DNA-based inheritance, triplet codon translation, and lipid bilayer membranes?
This is the major group of extinct marine arthropods that first appeared in abundance during the Cambrian explosion.
What are Trilobites?
This primary biological innovation directly triggered the rise of oxygen on Earth.
What is the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis in Cyanobacteria?
This is why hydrothermal vents are considered favorable environments for the origin of life.
What are thermal gradients and reduced chemicals that drive reactions that form complex carbon-based molecules?
These are the six periods of the Paleozoic Era in chronological order from oldest to youngest.
What are the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian?
According to endosymbiotic theory, this is the type of host organism that originally engulfed an aerobic bacterium.
What is an archaean?
This is the primary premise of the "RNA World" hypothesis.
What is RNA catalyzed its own replication and served as the original self-replicating molecule?