Biology- Chapter 15
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Created by:
meggiesk8s on January 12, 2012
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33 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 fossil | trace of a long-dead organism |
| sedimentary rock | formed when sediment is deposited by wind or water |
| sediment | dust, sand, or mud |
| mold | type of fossil that is an imprint in rock in the shape of the organism |
| cast | fossil that is a rocklike model of the organism |
| Robert Hooke | one of the first scientists to study fossils with a microscope; concluded that fossils are the remains of plants and animals |
| law of superposition | successive layers of rock and soil are deposited on top of one another by wind or water; the lowest stratum in the Earth is the oldest |
| stratum | layer of the Earth's surface |
| mass extinctions | brief periods of time during which large numbers of species disappeared |
| biogeography | the study of geographical distribution of fossils and of living organisms |
| Jean Baptiste de Lamarck | proposed that similar species descended from a common ancestor, and that acquired traits were passed on to offspring |
| acquired trait | trait that is not determined by genes |
| natural selection | process by which organisms best suited to their environment reproduce more successfully than other organisms |
| population | inter-breeding single-species group |
| Charles Lyell | wrote "Principles of Geology" and emphasized the age of Earth and uniformitarianism |
| uniformitarianism | the geological structure of Earth resulted from cycles of observable processes and these same processes operate continuously through time |
| descent with modification | Darwin's theory that the newer forms appearing in the fossil record are actually the modified descendants of older species |
| modification by natural selection | Darwin's theory that the environment limits the growth of populations |
| Thomas Malthus | pointed out that populations have the potential of doubling and redoubling, but are limited by adverse conditions |
| adaptation | a species changes in response to its environment because the proportion of favorable traits increases |
| fitness | a single organism's genetic contribution to the next generation |
| adaptive advantage | a favorable trait |
| demands of the environment | selection conditions change as the _____________ change |
| homologous | similar features that originated in a shared ancestor |
| analogous | features that serve identical functions and look somewhat alike, but can be very different in internal anatomy |
| vestigial features | features that were useful to an ancestor, but are not useful to the modern organism that has them |
| conserved | remained unchanged (referring to genes) |
| Ernst Haeckel | studied similarities in embryology |
| coevolution | the change of two or more species in close association with each other (ex: predator & prey) |
| convergent evolution | the environment selects similar phenotypes, even though the ancestral types were quite different from each other |
| divergent evolution | two or more related populations or species become more and more dissimilar |
| adaptive radiation | many related species evolve from a single ancestral species |
| artificial selection | the process of divergence can be sped up artificially |
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