Lecture 9

Question 1

Biodiversity

Answer 1

Variety of life

Question 2

What components does biodiversity comprise?

Answer 2

Ecological, organismal, genetic

Question 3

Why is biodiversity important?

Answer 3

Different species have different functional roles
Influence the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to disturbance (resilience capacity of the ecosystem)

Question 4

What are species-poor systems expected to be?

Answer 4

More vulnerable to external forcing factors

Question 5

Biodiversity through time

Answer 5

Number of taxonomic families

Question 6

Stratigraphy

Answer 6

Description of all rock bodies forming the Earth’s crust and their organization into distinctive, useful, mappable units based on their inherent properties or attributes, in order to establish:
Their distribution and relationship in space
Their succession in time, to permit us to interpret geological history

Question 7

Biostratigraphy

Answer 7

Discipline of stratigraphy that deals with the distribution of fossils in the stratigraphic record and the organization of strata into units on the bases of their fossil content

Question 8

Faunal succession

Answer 8

Smith realized that:
Sedimentary rocks contain unique sets of fossils
Fossil assemblages succeed each other in a vertical section and can be identified over large distances
Occurrence of fossil assemblages can be independent of lithology

Question 9

Facies

Answer 9

Body of rock with distinctive characteristics (appearance, composition, conditions of formation, etc.)

Question 10

What does a sedimentary facies generally reflect?

Answer 10

A certain environment or set of depositional conditions

Question 11

What can facies be used as?

Answer 11

A proxy for paleoenvironment

Question 12

Biozones

Answer 12

Bodies of strata that are defined or characterized on the basis of their contained fossils

Question 13

Index fossils

Answer 13

Widespread short-lived (or rapidly evolving) species
Indicators of faunal stages, fossil zones, or geologic periods

Question 14

Examples of index fossils

Answer 14

Rugose corals and ammonoids

Question 15

Lazarus taxon

Answer 15

Taxon that disappears from the fossil record for one or more periods, only to appear again later

Question 16

Elvis taxon

Answer 16

Taxon that has been thought to have re-emerged after an apparent extinction, but that is actually a different organism with similar morphology, due to convergent evolution