Definition | Term |
Study of patterns in the geographic distribution of species and communities | Biogeography |
The scientific study of similarities and differences in body plans. | Comparative Morphology |
Physical evidence of a species that lived in the past and is now extinct | Fossil |
When a species gets a mutation that fits in with the environment and passes the trait to offspring. | Adaptation |
Change in a line of descent | Evolution |
A species ability to reproduce and spread the ability to the offspring to survive and reproduce for generations to come. | Fitness |
Line of descent | Lineage |
When a species has to choose what kind of species it has to reproduce with because of that species' specific traits (e.g. a bird reproducing with another bird that can camouflage when predators come) | Natural Selection |
The time it takes for half of a quantity of a radioisotope to decay | Half-Life |
Method of estimating the age of a rock or fossil by measuring the content and proportions of a radioisotope and its daughter elements | Radiometric Dating |
A supercontinent that formed before Pangea that formed more than 500 million years ago | Gondwana |
A supercontinent that formed about 270 million years ago | Pangea |
A theory stating that the Earth's outer layer is cracked into plates. | Plate Tectonic Theory |
Chronology of Earth's history. | Geologic Time Scale |
Similar body structures that evolved separately in different lineages | Analogous Structure |
Body structures that are similar in different lineages because they evolved in a common ancestor | Homologous Structure |
Evolutionary pattern in which similar body parts evolve separately in different lineages | Morphological Convergance |
Evolutionary pattern in which a body part in an ancestor changes in its descendants | Morphological Divergence |