Exam 16: The Evolution of Biodiversity

Members of all of Earth's different species (past and present)have been (or will be)converted into some type of fossil after their death.

A mutation in a homeotic gene would NOT be likely to cause which of the following developmental changes in an organism?

Scientists can determine the approximate age of a fossil by using an unstable form of the element uranium,Uranium-235,which has a half-life of 700 million years.Such an unstable form of an element is called a ______________.

The first vertebrates to colonize land were ____________.

Mammals were able to evolve to fill some ecological roles that had previously been filled by dinosaurs,when the extinction of dinosaurs brought an end to the ____________________ between these two groups of animals.

Mammals branched out to evolve many new species after the extinction of the ___________________.

The first single-celled prokaryotes evolved 3 billion years after the first eukaryotes.

We know that whales evolved from the same evolutionary ancestor as hoofed animals like cows and hippopotamuses because ____________.

Mass extinctions remove dominant groups of organisms and thus provide new ecological and evolutionary opportunities for groups of organisms that were previously of little importance.These organisms can then fill the now existing niches through the process of ___________.

A gene that controls a battery of other genes that are responsible for the development of structures such as a limb during embryological development is called a(n)_____________.

Evidence that the Cretaceous mass extinction was created by the impact of an asteroid is the existence,buried under sediments off the coast of Mexico,of a huge ____________________.

About 220 million years ago,mammals evolved from ____________________.

Closely related phyla are grouped together into a class.

The Cambrian explosion resulted in the evolution of more than 17,000 species of an animal known as the trilobite.The shear number of trilobite fossils found in modern times suggests that trilobites were very abundant,perhaps the rulers of the seas.Today,no living descendants of this group exist.What happened?

Oxygen was one of the original gases abundant in Earth's atmosphere before the evolution of life.

Scientific advances in the study of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo)have demonstrated that another factor has had as much of an impact as specific alterations in the genes on the macroevolutionary changes in body plans that have been observed through time.This factor is _____________.

The preserved footprint of a Neanderthal is a fossil.

A group of orders is called a(n)____________.

A node on an evolutionary tree represents ___________.

Which of the following does NOT lead to adaptive radiation?