Hans Cristian Sagundo

Grade 12 Stem B

1. What is the age of the Earth?

The age of the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

2. What was the Earth like millions of years ago?

Million years ago, the Earth was a home to diverse forms of life including plant and animals that existed
upon large bodies of water and green portion of the land in the planet.

3. When did man first appear on Earth?

Man first appeared on Earth on the Pleistocene Epoch, Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era,
approximately 1.8 million years ago.

4. What are the divisions of the geologic time scale?

The Geologic Time Scale is divided into eons, eras, periods and epochs.

5. What is the biggest time frame in the GTS?

The biggest time frame in the GTS is the eons. The biggest period of time is the Proterozoic Eon and/or
Pre-Cambrian Era.

6. What is the smallest time frame in the GTS?

The smallest time frame in the GTS is the epochs. The smallest period of time, the most recent, is the
Cenozoic Era.

7. What are the major events and characteristic organisms in each divisions?

Eons are categorized by abundance of certain fossils while eras are known for major changes in the fossil
record. Periods are based on the types of life existing at the time and epochs are marked by differences in life
forms and can vary from continent to continent.

8. What are the major events in the history of life?

The major events in the history of life includes and is affected by major geologic events, climate
changes, changes in ecosystems, changes in continental position and includes also the first appearance, the
dominance/abundance and the major and minor extinctions of different organisms.

9. What is the Cambrian Explosion?

The Cambrian Explosion happened 540 million years ago when early life forms begun to flourish and most
major groups of animals first appeared on the fossil record.

10. What is the proposed new epoch that we are in?

It was proposed that we are entering a new epoch called Anthropocene epoch.
 11. What are fossils? How are they formed?

Fossils are traces of plants and animals of the past that hold records of life. Fossils are formed when the
physical part of any dead plant or animal were buried in the Earth’s crust usually in layer of sediments.
Overtime, these remains were replaced by minerals forming rocklike materials called the fossils.

12. List down the types of fossils and given examples.

There are several types of fossils namely; (1) mold fossils (eg. shells in top of rocks), (2) trace fossils (eg.
fossilized nests, gastroliths, burrows, footprints), (3) petrified/permineralized fossils (eg. petrified wood, most
dinosaur bones, trilobites fossils) and (4) originally preserved/ unaltered organism (eg. freezing woolly
mammoths in the permafrost).

13. How do we measure the age of fossils?

The age of fossils is determined by using absolute dating, done by analyzing the age of rock layers,
where fossils are found, using radioactive elements or radioisotopes to determine the rate of decay of certain
radioactive isotopes.

14. What are mass extinctions? How many mass extinction events happened in the GTS?

Mass extinctions are the extinction of a large number of species within a relatively short period of
geological time, due to factors such as a catastrophic global event or widespread environmental change that
occurs too rapidly for most species to adapt.

There are five mass extinction events in the GTS, namely Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, Devonian
Extinction, Permian- Triassic Extinction, Triassic- Jurassic extinction and the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.

15. Where did scientists discover the first dinosaurs?

In 1677, Robert Plot is credited with discovering the first dinosaur bone. It was said a huge thigh bone
(femur) was found in England by Robert Plot probably from a dinosaur.

16. Who coined the term dinosaurs?

Paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term dinosaurs in 1842.

17. How did the discovery of dinosaurs make scientists become more interested in the geologic record?

The discovery of the dinosaurs make scientists wonder into how dinosaurs especially the big one have
moved and lived without having damage to rare fossils of the past time before their existence. This made
scientists question the diversity of dinosaur and the dinosaur behavior and thus, question if the dinosaurs are
related to any family of organism.

18. How can fossils be used as evidence for the evolution of living forms?

By comparing fossils on different rock layers, scientists were able to infer changes that occurred on the
characteristics of various organisms and to reconstruct the order of changes that those generations of organisms
have undergone.