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Chapter 10
vocabulary words
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Fossils | The preserved remains or evidence of ancient living things |
| Catastrophism | Idea that conditions and organisms on earth change in quick violent events |
| Uniformitarianism | States that geologic processes that occur today, are similar to those that occurred in the past |
| carbon film | The fossilized carbon outline of an organism or part of an organism |
| Mold | Impression in a rock left by an ancient organism |
| Cast | Fossil copy of an organism made when a mold of an organism is filled with sediment or mineral deposits |
| Trace fossil | Preserved evidence of the activity of an organism |
| Paleontologist | Scientists who study fossils |
| relative age | the age of rocks and geologic features compared with other rocks and features nearby |
| superposition | the principle that in undisturbed rock layers, the oldest rocks are on the bottom |
| inclusion | a piece of an older rock that becomes part of a new rock |
| unconformity | surface where rock has eroded away producing a break or gap in the rock record |
| correlation | matching rocks and fossils from separate locations |
| index fossils | represent species that existed on earth for a short length of time, were abundant, and inhabited many locations |
| absolute age | to mean the numeral age, in years of a rock or object |
| isotopes | atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons |
| radioactive decay | the process by which an unstable element naturally changes into another element that is stable |
| half life | the time required for half of the parent isotopes to decay into daughter isotopes |