Exam 8: Time and Geology

A(n)_______ fossil is a fossil from a very short-lived,geographically widespread species that existed during a specific interval of geologic time.

Another term for cosmogenic isotope dating is surface exposure dating.

Our ability to assign an age to geological and archaeological materials is based on our ability to measure the relative abundance of radioactive ___ and their stable decay products.

The principle of ___ states that an original sedimentary layer extends laterally until it tapers or thins at is edges.

The principle of _____ allows rock layers in different places to be correlated on the basis of their fossils.

_____ are subdivisions of eras.

Radiocarbon dating is useful in dating an event that occurred in the past ________ years.

The _____ includes most of geologic time (87%).

Relative time refers to the time sequence in which events take place rather than the number of years involved.

A formation is the process by which sedimentary rocks come into existence.

The _____ ended with the greatest mass extinction ever to occur on Earth.

The _______ Era is the Age of Mammals.

The half-life of the carbon 14 isotope is 5730 years.If there were 4 billion atoms of C-14 in a particular organism at the time it died,how many atoms of C-14 would there be in the remains of that organism 11,460 years after it died?

The _____ is the principle says that the same processes and natural laws that operated in the past are those we can actually observe or infer from observation as operating at present.

Fossils are common in __.

The Earth's largest mass extinction coincides with _____ in Siberia.

The principle of original horizontality states that beds of sediment are nearly always deposited as nearly horizontal layers.

Isotopes of same element have different numbers of neutrons.

____ dating uses the effect of neutron radiation coming from deep space to date material at Earth's surface.

The Mesozoic Era precedes (is older than)the Paleozoic Era.