Name ____________________________________ Date ___________________________ Block ___________
Fossil Stories
Directions: Answer the following questions as you navigate through Understanding Geologic
Time. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/explorations/tours/geotime/gtpage1.html
1. How is relative age different from the actual date of an event?
2. What can radiometric dating tell us about the age of rocks that the Law of Superposition
cannot?
3. How can you find the age of a layer of rock that is surrounded by layers of volcanic ash?
4. What do the periods in the geologic time scale represent?
5. What do the terms Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic mean?
Name ____________________________________ Date ___________________________ Block ___________
Use the link to fill in the chart.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/explorations/tours/stories/middle/intro.html
Evidence
What it tells us:
Past Lives
1. growth rings in fossil trees or
Growth rings tell us the number of years that individual lived.
shells
2. curled up fossil trilobites
3. the contents of fossil nests
4. fossils of many individuals of
the same species together
5. a change in the shape of a
feature over time
Geologic Time
1. layers in the rocks
2. index fossils
3. fossil shells on mountain
tops
4. identical fossils on widely
separated continents
Name ____________________________________ Date ___________________________ Block ___________
Paleoecology
1. fossil marine animals in the
desert
2. shapes of leaf edges
3. tooth marks in fossil shells
4. fossil pollen
Biodiversity
1. fossils of organisms no
longer alive today
2. features that are shared by
more than one species
3. the extinction of many fossil
species at the same time
4. the extinction of one group of
organism, like corals, on which
other organisms depend