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As fossilization is an uncommon occurrence, usually requiring hard body parts and death near a site where sediments are being deposited, the fossil record only provides sparse and intermittent information about the evolution of life. Evidence of organisms prior to the development of hard body parts such as shells, bones and teeth is especially ...
However, because evolution is a branching process that produces a complex bush pattern of related species rather than a linear process producing a ladder-like progression, and because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, it is unlikely that any particular form represented in the fossil record is a direct ancestor of any other. Cladistics ...
Fossils of organisms' bodies are usually the most informative type of evidence. The most common types are wood, bones, and shells. [57] Fossilisation is a rare event, and most fossils are destroyed by erosion or metamorphism before they can be observed. Hence the fossil record is very incomplete, increasingly so further back in time.
A rare fossil of an adolescent Tyrannosaurus rex has been excavated in North Dakota's badlands - a find noteworthy for the scientific insight it may offer into the life history of this famous ...
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...
In 2014, physician Pedro Lucas Porcela Aurelio found the fossil in the town of Paraiso do Sul in Brazil's southernmost Rio Grande do Sul state. He donated it to a local university in 2021, kicking ...
Fossil resin often contains other fossils called inclusions that were captured by the sticky resin. These include bacteria, fungi, other plants, and animals. Animal inclusions are usually small invertebrates , predominantly arthropods such as insects and spiders, and only extremely rarely a vertebrate such as a small lizard.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.