SC100 - Life Study Guide

Chapter 1:

1. Fortey uses the word "interloper" to describe their vessel. Of what significance is this?

2. What is limestone? How is it formed?

3. How are fossils dated? How are they formed?

4. Following the Big Bang, what is it that Fortey attributes to ability to nurture life?

Chapter 2:

1. What is the soul of life?

2. What s the soul of rock?

3. Name the elements necessary for life, per Fortey.

4. What were the first life forms on Earth?

5. How is it that life may have started on Earth? (3 theories)

6. What is the significance of slime and mats?

7. How does symbiosis play into the origin of life on Earth? Give an example.

8. What are the three thresholds discussed with reference to life’s origin on Earth?

9. What prediction does Fortey make at the chapter’s end?

Chapter 3:

1. What four basic classifications can be used to separate life forms? Give an example of a member of each.

2. What are the requirements for naming species? How are species and genus designated?

3. What are Ediacara?

4. What traces have been left by the first animals?

Chapter 4:

1. How can a paleontologist distinguish Precambrian from Cambrian sediments?

2. What is meant by arthropod? What Cambrian animals were the first of these?

3. What organisms were present at the base of Cambrian time?

4. What was the composition of the ecosystem?

Chapter 5:

1. What are the two levels of the sea? Give examples of ecology occurring in each.

2. How did the conodont animal reveal itself to scientists over time? Describe one.

3. What similarities did the graptolite discovery description have with conodonts? Describe one.

4. How was the Ordovician sea different from the Cambrian sea?

5. What major event marks the end of the Ordovician and the beginning of the Silurian? What evidence remains?

Chapter 6:

1. What physical changes occurred on the Earth during the Silurian?

2. How did plants adapt to these changes? Give an example.

3. How did animals adapt? Discuss the changes.

4. What miniature predators lived during the Devonian?

5. What plants thrived, as they do today, in this period?

6. What is meant by cladistics?

Chapter 7:

1. Describe the Carboniferous forest flora and fauna. What remains of these after millions of years?

2. What adaptations had been made by plants? By animals?

3. What are other terms for "slop and drain"?

4. What new classification of land animal lived in this period?

5. What new plants and animals lived in the oceans?

Chapter 8:

1. What evidence is there that a super continent existed in the late Carboniferous/early Permiam period?

2. What was Wegner’s title for this continent? What does it mean?

3. How did the climate on the land differ from that of the Carboniferous ?

4. What important minerals resulted from evaporites during the Permian?

5. What anatomical feature provide a map for evolution?

6. What mammal-like reptile, often mistaken as a dinosaur, ranged the Permian forests?

7. What event at the end of the Permian has puzzled paleontologists? What may have caused this event?

Chapter 9:

1. What was the first piece of evidence found of dinosaur existence during the Cretaceous period?

2. What type of ecosystem did these terrible lizards inhabit?

3. What is the answer to the "bird/dinosaur conundrum "?

4. What changed in terms of fauna communications during this period?

5. What fauna were contemporaries of the dinosaurs? What adaptation had they developed?

6. What is chalk?

7. Explain how evolving predators and prey sought to outwit one another.

8. What evolution had plants undergone during this period? What evidence is there?

9. Describe co-evolution.

Chapter 10:

1. What is the K-T boundary? What happened? What proof is there?

2. What occurrences led to the phytoplanktons’ demise, plants’ destruction and eventual dinosaurs’ extinction? Describe the chain reaction that resulted.

3. What surprising discovery was made about plants represented in the rock layer above the K-T boundary? What recent event in the USA confirms this occurrence?

4. What animals survived this cataclysmic event? What are some reasons for their survival?

5. What plants survived this cataclysmic event? What are some reasons for their survival?

6. What is the theory of periodic mass extinction?

Chapter 11:

1. What animals were present in the Tertiary? Give examples.

2. How did these animals survive the K-T extinction? What trait(s) favored their survival?

3. What mammals emerged on the land 3 million years ago?

4. What mammals emerged in the sea 3 million years ago?

5. What are monotremes? Give an example.

6. What are marsupials? Give an example.

7. How were mammalians separated by naturally occurring events onto the continents where they are found today?

8. What flowering plant evolved in the Tertiary to the benefit of mammalian populations?

9. Why did the ice ages in the Pleistocene not cause mass extinction?

Chapter 12:

1. Give examples of similarities between humans and chimps. How long ago did the divergence of this line occur?

2. Name the indicators for distinguishing between humans and apes.

3. What difficulties arise in knowing the fossilized past of humans?

4. Where did Homo sapiens originate? What evidence is there?

5. How did humans, like life before them, adapt to the changing world from 30,000 years ago to today?

Chapter 13:

1. What does luck have to do with species survival?

2. How has life made its own luck?