Exam 23: Paleobiology and Macroevolution

Radiometric dating works best with ____.

Some animals have evolved sexual maturity in juvenile body forms. This is called ____.

The most severe mass extinction occurred at the end of the Permian Period.

Vicariance is defined as the movement of organisms away from their place of origin.

The mass extinction of most dinosaurs occurred rapidly as a result of a single cataclysmic event.

Which adaptation is least likely to be found in any dinosaurs?

Which group of animals are living representatives of the theropods, a lineage of bipedal predatory dinosaurs?

What is the general trend in diversity in vascular plants for the past 145 million years?

The movement of organisms away from their place of origin, called ____, can produce a ____ distribution, in which closely related species live in widely separated locations.

Although ferns and conifers maintained their diversity into the early Cenozoic era, ____ may have hastened their decline in the early Cretaceous.

Fossil evidence from five continents exists for 100 extinct, and one extant, species of ____

The fossil record indicates that the immediate ancestors of modern marine animals diversified in the ____ period, right after the ____ extinction.

At times when Earth's climate was cooler than it is today, the polar ice caps ____, rainfall ____, and sea levels ____.

Today we are living in one of the ____ periods of Earth's history, but global climate change is occurring much ____ than ever before.

The most severe mass extinction on Earth occurred at the end of the ____ period.

Changes in the timing of developmental events is called ____.

As environments change, poorly adapted organisms will not survive and reproduce; therefore, we can expect species to disappear at some low rate, called the ____.

In marine sticklebacks, the Pitx1 gene is ____, but in freshwater sticklebacks, the Pitx1 gene is ____.

A species confined to a specific geographic area and found nowhere else on Earth is called ____.