ESSENTIALS OF ECOLOGY

WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY AND WHY IS IT

IMPORTANT?
• Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is the variety of the earth’s species, the genes
they contain, the ecosystems in which they live, and the ecosystem processes such as
energy flow and nutrient cycling that sustain all life (Figure 4-2). Biodiversity is a
vital renewable resource.
• the earth’s 4 million to 100 million species, and every year, thousands of new species
are identified.
• The identified species include almost a million species of insects, 270,000 plant
species, and 45,000 vertebrate animal species.
THE FOSSIL RECORD TELLS MUCH
OF THE STORY OF EVOLUTION

• Most of what we know of the earth’s life history comes from fossils:
mineralized or petrified replicas of skeletons, bones, teeth, shells, leaves, and
seeds, or impressions of such items found in rocks. Also, scientists drill cores
from glacial ice at the earth’s poles and on mountaintops and examine the
kinds of life found at different layers. Fossils provide physical evidence of
ancient organisms and reveal what their internal structures looked like
• The world’s cumulative body of fossils found is called the fossil record. This
record is uneven and incomplete.
• Some forms of life left no fossils, and some fossils have decomposed. The
fossils found so far probably represent only 1% of all species that have ever
lived.
• Trying to reconstruct the development of life with so little evidence—a
challenging scientific detective game—is the work of paleontologists.