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Chapter 10 Vocab
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| fossils | are the preserved remains or evidence of ancient living things |
| catastrophism | is the idea that conditions and organisms on Eath change in quick violent events |
| uniformitarianism | states that geologic processes that occur today are similar to those that have occured in the past |
| carbon film | is the fossilied carbon outline of an organism or part of an organism |
| mold | is the impression in a rock left by an ancient organism |
| cast | is a fossil copy of an organism made when a mold of the organism is filled with sediment or mineral deposits |
| trace fossil | is the preserved evidence of the activity of an organism |
| paleontologists | scientists who study fossils |
| relative age | is the age of rocks and geologic features compared with other rocks and features nearby |
| superposition | is the princithat in undistured rock layers, the oldest rocks are on the bottom |
| inclusion | a piece of an older rock that becomes part of a new rock |
| unconformity | is a surface where rock has eroded away, producing a break, or a gap, in the rock record |
| correlation | matching rocks and fossils from separate locations |
| index fossils | represent species that existed on Earth for a short lenght of time, were abundant, and inhabited many locations |
| absolute age | to mean the numerical age, in years, of a rock or object |
| istopes | are atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons |
| radioactive decay | is the process by which an unstable element naturally changes into another element that is stable |
| half-life | is the time required for half of the parent isotopes to decay into daughter isotoper |