Term
| Age range of the Great Oxidation Event |
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Definition
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Term
| Typical ambling speed of a sauropod |
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Definition
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Definition
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Definition
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| Age range of the Oxygen Revolution |
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Definition
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Term
| A method of dating the origin of a lineage by comparing changes in DNA with those determined from a well-dated part of its lineage. |
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Definition
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Term
| The continent that represented the cradle of evolution for early hominids. |
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Definition
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| The carnosaur group that gave rise to the terrestrial top-carnivoes in Cretaceous ecosystems of South American and Africa. |
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Definition
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Term
| The common name for fossilized tree resin, in which soft bodied animals and even DNA can be preserved. |
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Definition
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Term
| A general term to refer to the earliest amniotes (reptiles like Protothyris) that lacked fenstrae behind the orbits of their skull. |
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Definition
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Term
| The most important group of vascular plants in the Cenozoic. |
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Definition
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Term
| Scientific name for the world's first bird, for the Jurassic. |
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Definition
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Term
| The oldest eon in Earth's evolution |
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Definition
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Term
| A nearly complete 4.4 million year old skeleton that has significantly eludicated early hominid evolution. |
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Definition
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Term
| The continent whose breakaway from Antarctica 38 million years ago isolated a marsupial fauna and led to a global climate in climate. |
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Definition
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Term
| The genus that includes "Lucy" and "Tuang Child". |
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Definition
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Term
| Mammals that returned to the seas as top-carnivores of the Eocene. |
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Definition
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Term
| The marine top-carnivore of the Eocene. |
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Definition
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Term
| A synapsid group that achieved flight in the Eocene. |
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Definition
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Term
| The period that contains the worlds oldest chordates such as Pikaia from the Burgess Shale. |
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Definition
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Term
| The period of Anomalocaris, Opabinia, Marella, Pikaia, and marine animals covered in sclerites. |
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Definition
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Term
| Oldest of Sepkoski's three faunas. Characterized by trilobites and archaic molluscs. |
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Definition
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Term
| The evolutionary event that produced the first animal predators and scavengers in Earth history. |
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Definition
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Term
| An isotope of carbon that is especially useful for dating organic materials less than 50,000 years old. |
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Definition
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Term
| The period of coal swamps, giant insects, and the earliest reptiles. Marked by the widespread forests of lycopods and seed ferns. |
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Definition
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Term
| A physiological rule that animals with sprawling posture can't run and breathe at the same time. |
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Definition
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Term
| The predominant plant group eaten by Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, and other Jurassic dinosaurs. |
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Definition
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Term
| The marine top-carnivore of the Ordovician of the Kingston area. |
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Definition
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Term
| A term used to refer to a monopolyletic group that includes an ancestor and all of its descendants. |
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Definition
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Term
| A method of classification that directly measures the degree of genetic difference between two taxa. |
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Definition
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Term
| Reason why reptiles could completely leave the water. |
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Definition
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Term
| Alfred Wegner's hypothesis, based on continental configurations and fossil distributions, that the continents have moved over geological time. |
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Definition
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Term
| Top terrestrial carnivores in the Eocene. |
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Definition
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Term
| The period that contains the oldest marsupials, placentals, and angiosperms. |
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Definition
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Definition
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Term
| The period known as the "age of fishes". |
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Definition
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Term
| Top terrestrial carnivore in the Permian. |
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Definition
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Term
| A general name for biogas that immediately follow mass extinctions (characterized by stromatolites in the marine realm, ferns and or weeds on land). |
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Definition
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Term
| The period containing a variety of early experiments in complex multicellularity, including the oldest known soft bodied animals. Also known as the period "when life got big". |
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Definition
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Term
| The epoch that ended with "La Grande Coupure". The warmest epoch of the Cenozoic, marked by the Fossil Forest on Axel Heiberg island in the Canadian Arctic. |
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Definition
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Term
| A general term for shallow seas that cover the continents during times of high sea level, including the Ordovician in Kingston area. |
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Definition
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Term
| The morphological feature that is used to distinguish dinosaurs from more primitive archosaurs. |
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Definition
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Term
| General term for organisms with organelles and their DNA in a nucleus |
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Definition
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Term
| The evolutionary relationship of Ediacaran vendobionts and rangeomorphs relative to modern life. |
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Definition
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Term
| A term used to refer to the solar output in the Archean. |
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Definition
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Term
| A fossil assemblage from the eocene of arctic Canada that has proven critical for studies of Cenozoic climate change. |
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Definition
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Term
| The highest tier of filter feeding animals in the Paleozoic fauna. |
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Definition
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Term
| The biotic event triggered by the docking of North America and South America in the Pliocene. |
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Definition
| The Great American Interchange |
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Term
| Why its unlikely for life exist on the surface of the earth prior to 3.8Ga. |
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Definition
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Term
| The climactic cycle/regime that characterizes the Ordovician, Jurassic, Silurian, Cretaceous, Cambrian, Carboniferous, and Neogene. |
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Definition
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Term
| A general term for ecological strategies that evolved repeatedly (eg. top carnivores, megaherbivores, grazers). |
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Definition
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Term
| A climatic cycle/regime that characterized that Neoproterozoic, Permian and Neogene. |
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Definition
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Term
| The climatic/cycle regime that characterized the Cambrian, Carboniferous, and Neogene. |
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Definition
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Term
| A Mesozoic group of small, agile, dolphin-like marine reptiles that gave birth to young at sea. |
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Definition
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Term
| A general term for a concentration of platinum group elements in a thin sedimentary layer. |
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Definition
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Definition
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| Canada's newest UNESCO World Heritage Site, a sea side section in Nova Scotia where early reptiles are preserved inside trunks of lycopod trees. |
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Definition
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Term
| The middle period of the Mesozoic Era. |
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Definition
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Term
| A classic example of the fossils of an Ordovician epeiric sea. |
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Definition
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Term
| A large varanid lizard that may serve as modern analogue for the hunting strategy of Tyrannosaurus rex. |
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Definition
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Term
| A Chinese fossil Lagerstatten that has yielded numerous critical fossils including feathered dinosaurs and the oldest marsupials and placentals. Was also the site of a 3.6 million year old australopithecine walking trail. |
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Definition
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Term
| The phase immediately following a mass extinction, during which biomass, number of organisms, and diversity are all low. |
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Definition
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Term
| A clade of placental mammals that includes morphologically disparate creatures (eg. elephants, hyraxes, aardvarks, and manatees) that are united in their African origins and by similarities in their DNA). |
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Definition
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Term
| A nearly complete 4.4 million year old skeleton that has significantly eludicated early hominid evolution. |
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Definition
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Term
| The predominant plant group eaten by Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, and other Jurassic dinosaurs. |
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Definition
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Term
| A small permian diapsid that lived in streams and ponds in South America and Southern Africa and came to epitomize the wildlife of Gondwana. |
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Definition
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Term
| The topographic feature that is formed when ocean floor is created between two spreading plates. |
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Definition
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Term
| An experiment that led to the inorganic synthesis of most of the organic molecules essential to life. |
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Definition
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Term
| The first (oldest) epoch of the Neogene, characterized by the widespread development of the Savannas. |
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Definition
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Term
| Site of Newfoundland assemblage of large, complex, soft bodied Ediacaran fossils. |
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Definition
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Term
| Flightless bird from New Zealand that was driven to extinction. |
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Definition
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Term
| One of Sepoksky's three marine faunas, characterized by mobile, lightly armoured animals such as fish. |
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Definition
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Term
| A method of phylogenetic analysis. |
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Definition
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Term
| The simplest living mammals, represented by the living platypus, and fossil representatives back to the Jurassic that have milk and fur, but produce by laying eggs. |
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Definition
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Term
| Diapsids that returned to the seas as the top-marine carnivores of the Cretaceous. |
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Definition
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Term
| An extinct group of rodent-like animals that were most common Mesozoic mammals. |
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Definition
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Term
| Water-absorbing structures in the nostrils of modern mammals and birds that are absent from dinosaur fossils. |
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Definition
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Term
| The marine top-carnivore of the Ediacaran. |
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Definition
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Term
| The terrestrial top-carnivore of the Ordovician. |
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Definition
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Term
| The continent that represented the cradle of evolution for the horses. |
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Definition
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Term
| An early super continent who's assembly 2 billion years ago provided the stable base for the proliferation of oxygen-producing cyanobacterial stromatolites. |
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Definition
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Term
| Thick deposits along the eastern North American and Western Europe that mark the Devonian collision between these continents. |
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Definition
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Term
| The last (youngest) epoch of the Paleogene. |
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Definition
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Term
| The period in which shelly organisms teemed in the epeiric sea covering the present-day location of Kingston. |
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Definition
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Term
| The common name for the "monogenesis" theory of human origins. |
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Definition
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Term
| The first (oldest) period of the Cenozoic. Also contains the Oligiocene epoch. |
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Definition
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Term
| One of Sepkoski's three evolutionary marine faunas, characterized by tiers of armoured filter feeders (eg. Crinoids and brachiopods). |
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Definition
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Term
| The most recent supercontinet, who's assembly 300 million years ago led to widespread glaciation in the southern hemisphere. |
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Definition
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Term
| An order of odd-toed ungulates that were most important in the early Cenozoic. |
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Definition
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Term
| The period that ended with the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history of all trilobites, tabulate corals, and rugose corals. |
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Definition
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Term
| The youngest (last) period of the Paleozoic era. |
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Definition
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Term
| 6H20+6H20 --> C6H12O6 + 6O2 |
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Definition
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Term
| An extinct group of mainly Paleocene, squirrel sized arboreal mammals that may represent early primates or an evolutionary branch just before the primates. |
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Definition
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Term
| "The Age of Stromatolites" |
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Definition
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Term
| The top aerial vertebrates throughout most of the Mesozoic. |
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Definition
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Term
| Van Valen's law that evolution in a species forces the evolution of all species to interact within it. |
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Definition
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Term
| A group of fish that is believed to have given rise to the tetrapods. |
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Definition
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Term
| An extinct group of lobe-finned fish that is transitional into the oldest tetrapods. |
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Definition
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Term
| A scottish locality that has yielded some of the earliest vascular plants anywhere on earth. |
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Definition
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Term
| Early vascular plants that grew to heights of half a meter in the Late Silurian. |
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Definition
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Term
| A superb record of the evolution of Austrailian mammals that spans much of the Cenozoic. |
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Definition
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Term
| The late Proterozoic supercontinent who's breakup led to global ice ages and the initial radiation of animals. |
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Definition
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Term
| The most important group of vascular plants in the late Paleozoic of Gondwana, typified by the genus Glossopteris. |
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Definition
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Term
| The now discredited view that brontosaurs spent their lives nearly totally submerged to support their bulk. |
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Definition
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Term
| Limestones from a shallow sea with superbly preserved fossils of pterosaurs, Compsagnathus, and Archaeopteryx. |
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Definition
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Term
| A continent whose mammalian carnivores were predominantly marsupials but whose large herbivores were mainly placental. |
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Definition
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Term
| The result of a test-tube experiment in which a constant supply of nucleates and relics enzyme was supplied to a QB virus. |
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Definition
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Term
| A general term to refer to Nuna, Rodinia, and Pangea. |
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Definition
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Term
| A skull condition that characterizes peclyosaurs, therapsids and mammals. |
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Definition
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Term
| Diapsids that were top terrestrial carnivores in the Paleocene and Eocene worldwide and lingered into the Pleistocene in South America. |
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Definition
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Term
| Technical term for the degree to which living monotremes and ancient therapsids control(ed) their body temperature. |
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Definition
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Term
| The terrestrial top-carnivore of the Cretaceous in North America. A dinosaur that may have fed in a manner similar to that of the Komodo Dragon. |
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Definition
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Term
| The "breakthrough" period that marked the appearance of frogs, turtles, crocodiles and dinosaurs. |
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Definition
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Term
| The austrailian site of the world's oldest microfossils and stromatolites. |
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Definition
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Term
| An extinct elephant that characterized the Pleistocene of Europe, Asia and North America. |
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Definition
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Term
| Diapsids that returned to the seas as the top marine carnivores of the Cretaceous, i.e Pleisiosaurs and Mososaurs. |
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Definition
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Term
| The skull characteristic which typifies pelycosaurs, therapsids and mammals. |
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Definition
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Term
| Relative dating technique using comparison of fossils from different stratagraphic sequences to estimate which layers are older and which are younger. |
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Definition
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Term
| Determine relative age in any single section, Oldest rock at bottom, youngest at top. |
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Definition
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Term
| Uses magnetic directions recorded in rocks to determine latitude at which the were formed-moving. |
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Definition
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