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| Adaptation |  A changed characteristic that improves an organism's ability to survive in an environment |
| Species | A group of organisms that are closely related and can mate to produce offspring |
| Evolution | The process in which inherited characteristics within a population change over generations |
| Fossil Record | A historical sequence of life determined by fossils found in sedimentary rock layers of the Earth's crust |
| Charles Darwin | A British naturalist who developed the theory on natural selection and wrote On the Origin of Species |
| Natural Selection | The process in which organisms that are best adapted to their environment survive and reproduce most successfully |
| Inherited Variation | Individuals within a population have slightly different traits |
| Speciation | The formation of a new species as a result of evolution |
| Punctuated Equilibrium | Theory that describes rapid evolution that occurs in "spurts" because of mutations that may benefit a species or rapid changes in an environment. |
| Gradualism | Theory describing evolution as a slow process when one species changes into a new species because of small variations over time |