What information do fossils provide about plants and animals?
What information do fossils provide about plants and animals?
Fossils provide evidence. They give us clues to past life on Earth. They tell us that life on Earth has changed over time. Fossils in younger rocks look like animals and plants that are living today.
What type of information do fossils provide?
By studying the fossil record we can tell how long life has existed on Earth, and how different plants and animals are related to each other. Often we can work out how and where they lived, and use this information to find out about ancient environments. Fossils can tell us a lot about the past.
What can fossils tell us about the plants and animals that lived and died?
These fossilised behaviours are known as trace fossils. Trace fossils can include animal footprints, bite marks, coprolites (fossil dung), or a preserved nest or burrow. They might tell us about how an organism moved, where and how it lived, what it ate, and how it hunted and socialised.
How does a fossil give information about changes over time?
How do fossils provide evidence for change over time? As the world changes, plants and animals change with it. Aside from a few living fossils, the species we see today are very different from species that lived in the past. Thus, the fossil record can be used to show that organisms changed to meet new conditions.
Why do fossils keep changing?
Organisms decompose more quickly when they are in contact with oxygen. When an organism is buried quickly, there is less decay and the better the chance for it to be preserved. The hard parts of organisms, such as bones, shells, and teeth have a better chance of becoming fossils than do softer parts.
What are fossils and how is age of fossils determined?
The age of the fossils is determined by the Radioactive carbon dating technique in which the half-life of carbon and found radioactive elements is determined to calculate the age of a fossil.
How do we know how old dinosaurs are?
There are two ways to determine the age of a dinosaur fossil. One is called relative geologic time, which involves deciding whether one dinosaur fossil is older or younger than another. The other is often called absolute geologic time, which involves estimating how many millions of years old a dinosaur fossil is.
What is older than a dinosaur?
In many ways, millipedes haven’t changed much since they first evolved. Some were much bigger than millipedes alive now — up to six feet long and a foot and a half wide. Fossils of these ancient millipedes are much older than those of dinosaurs, dating back over 400 million years.
Did dinosaurs coexist with monkeys?
Scientists have acquired new data supporting the idea that the last ancestor shared by all living primates walked with the dinosaurs more than 80 million years ago. The results came from a new technique used to reconstruct the course of animal evolution.
What came first humans or dinosaurs?
After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on Earth.
Who is Lucifer’s dad?
Samael