Exam 7: Evolution and the Fossil Record

The typical pattern of evolutionary radiation, such as that seen in the record of hexacorals, is characterized by evolution that

__________ undergo mutation without any effect on adaptation.

Mutation of __________ can profoundly modify an organism.

__________ is the term used to describe remarkably rapid evolutionary expansions of one or more phyla, classes, orders, or families during brief intervals of geologic time.

During a 12-million year interval within Jurassic, the shell of __________ became larger, thinner, and flatter.

Using the molecular clock method for determining how long ago two species, A1 and A2, diverged, what would be the time estimate if species A1 differed from species A2 by 30 percent and the mutation rate were was 1 percent per million years?

Cope's rule says that __________ tends to increase during the evolution of a group of animals.

The evolutionary radiation of the highly distinctive adaptations of cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria is reminiscent of

The cornerstone of modern genetics, which was discovered by Gregor Mendel, is called

The single largest mass extinction in Earth's history rose above the level of a __________-percent loss of then-living marine genera over an interval of a few million years or less.

Darwin's observations on the common ancestry of vertebrates were based on

Darwin noted the separation of different marine species by the Isthmus of Panama and concluded that this separation of species meant that

In a mass extinction, tropical species are particularly vulnerable because of

__________ are specialized features of animals and plants, which perform one or more useful functions.

__________ is the earliest recognized whale fossil.

An ancestral horse with a simple tooth is the

Over the course of geological time, the extinction rate for mammals has exceeded __________ percent per million years.

The modern hexacorals that build reefs in the world's oceans experienced their first adaptive radiation during

The distribution of the percentage extinction for genera of marine animals throughout Phanerozoic shows that there has/have been __________ great mass extinction(s) over the past 500 million years that claimed 40 percent or more of these genera.

Today, the rate of extinction of species surpasses the great mass extinctions of the geologic past, and the largest number of extinctions can be traced to