History of Life on Earth Review

TSW 1 - Different ways fossils can form

TSW 2 - The Geologic Timescale as a way to organise Earth's history

TSW 3 - Evidence from the fossil record for Earth's history

TSW 4 - Evidence from the fossil record for organism's history

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​Content Overview

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Answer the questions to see what you remember about the different ways fossils can form

How do we learn about ancient life?

• ​​Paleontologists look for clues to understand what happened in the past

• Fossils of single celled organisms date back as far as 3.8 billion years.

• A fossil is a trace or imprint of a living thing that is preserved by geologic processes

• When an ​organism is trapped in mud or sediment, the resulting fossil becomes part of that sedimentary layer of rock

Life Science

Paleontologists are people who study fossils!

The Fossil Record

• All the fossils that have been discovered worldwide make up the fossil record.

• The fossil record gives evidence of many of the different organisms that have lived during Earth's long history.

• Each fossil gives information about a single organism.

• But overall, it helps us to understand larger patterns of change.

Subject | Subject

Some text here about the topic of discussion

TSWs 3 and 4

• Information about the history of earth

• Information about the history of organisms​

​The fossil record provides us clues about the organisms that were alive in the past

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Layers of rock where there are no fossils provide evidence of mass extinctions​

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Mass extinctions

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The fossil record also provide evidence of the types of plants, climate and oxygen in the atmosphere.​

Earth's living conditions

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The fossil record also gives us clues about ancient animal behaviour

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Trace fossils can provide clues about family behaviours and courtship behaviours.

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For example, fossilised nests show us that adult dinosaurs would have cared for their young​

Organism's behaviours

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How organisms have changed

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Over many generations organisms change (evolve)

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Fossils can show how organisms have changed into what we see today, for example dinosaurs --> birds​

The Geologic Timescale (GTS)

​To keep track of Earth's long history, scientists have developed the geologic time scale.

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The geologic time scale is the standard method used to divide Earth's long 4.6-billion-year natural history into manageable parts.

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A tool organise to Earth's history.

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Right now, we are in the Holocene epoch of the Quaternary period (some scientists argue humans have created a new epoch by changing Earth - this is called the Anthropocene epoch but is not officially recognised yet

Was developed using the fossil record

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Earth's history is split into eons, eras, periods and epochs

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Each division represents a large-scale change in Earth's conditions​

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You will be required to describe the conditions and organisms present in one of Earth's periods in your quiz on Friday!!!!!

​GTS continued

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Paleontologists used relative and absolute dating to estimate the age of fossils

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Index fossils are widespread fossils that only existed on Earth for a short period of time​

If you find an index fossil in a new location, you can confidently age that layer of rock or fossil and then use relative dating to estimate the ages of layers above and below that layer

​How we know this