Geology 100: Dinosaurs – Flashcards
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What were the first dinosaurs described in Europe? (There are three of them)
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Megalosaurus, Iguanadon, and Hylaeosaurus
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Who described the Megalosaurus?
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Buckland
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What year was the Megalosaurus described in?
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1824
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Who described the Iguanadon?
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Mantell
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Who described the Hylaeosaurus?
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Mantell
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What were the first dinosaurs described in North America? (There are two of them)
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Deinodon and Trachodon
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Who described the Deinodon?
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Leidy
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Who described the Trachodon?
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Leidy
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Who introduced the term Dinosauria?
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Sir. Richard Owen
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What does Dinosauria mean?
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"Terrible Lizard"
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What was the Basis of the Owen-Hawkins dinosaur sculptures?
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Bulky, Lizard/toad-like brutes
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How did the great dinosaur rush influence scientific understanding of dinosaurs?
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Many new dinosaur fossils were found. Dinosaurs started being viewed as not so large and brutal.
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What was the turn-of-the-century scientific image of dinosaurs?
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The turn-of-the-century dinosaur image was that they were cold-blooded and lizard like.
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Why did the turn of the century image of dinosaurs not change until the 1970's?
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Ostrom found some evidence that suggested to him that dinosaurs were more like birds than retiles. They were warm blooded. Also the painter, charles R Knite painted images of dinosaurs in active poses.
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How did the two great dinosaur-collecting expeditions of the first half of this century contribute to our knowledge of dinosaurs?
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Many new types of dinosaurs were discovered. We have a new understanding of biology. We can find dinosaurs outside of Europe and North America.
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What were the two expeditions of the first half of the century?
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Central Asiatic and German East African
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What is the central ideas behind Darwinian evolution?
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Natural selection. The environment is the controlling factor. Servival of the fittest. (Malthus's essay-idea)
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Why do paleontologists who study dinosaurs favor cladistics instead of the stratophenetic method of phylogeny reconstruction?
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The stratophenetic method was like making a family tree for the dinosaurs. Scientists think it makes too many assumptions. Cladistics allow scientists to organize the information they collect without making"family tree assumptions".
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Why does convergence pose a problem to cladistics?
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Just because two species have the same features does not mean that they share a common ancestor. They both just adapted to similar environments. This can cause confusion and lead to misrepresenting a species on a cladogram.
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What is the basis of biological classification?
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Putting species into groups based on a shared common ancestry.
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What is the principle of priority?
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mandates that the oldest correctly proposed scientific name for an animal has priority over later names proposed for that animal.
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How is the principle of priority applied to scientific names of dinosaurs.
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Sometimes a dinosaur is discovered by two scientists and both give it a name. The first name it is given is the real name. The second name is called a synonym for the first name. The first name is called the scientific name.
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What are the weaknesses of the dinosaur fossil record for studying evolution?
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Dinosaur fossils are rarely abundant enough or close enough to each other in time to allow paleontologists to study the micro-evolution of dinosaurs.
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What are the strengths of the dinosaur fossil record for studying evolution?
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The fossils we do have help us create cladograms which help us understand how the evolutionary path went....we don't have every little detail but we have enough to get a broad picture of our Earths evolutionary history.
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What types of dinosaur fossils can paleontologists collect and study?
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Body fossils and trace fossils.
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What are body fossils?
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skeletons and eggs
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What are trace fossils?
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Skin impressions, nests, coprolites, and footprints
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How are most bones preserved?
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Most bones are found in sedimentary rocks by the accumulation and cementation of mineral grains or by chemical precipitation.
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How does bone fossilize?
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death-decay-burial-mineralization
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How long does it take for a bone to become fossilized?
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10,000 years a least.
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What is the composition of modern bone and fossil bone?
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Bone is 50% mineral (hydroxyl-apatite) and 50% orgnic (protein fibers). Bones are porous.
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What are the differences between fossil and modern bone?
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...
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What are the similarities between the fossil and modern bone?
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...
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How are cellular details preserved in fossil bone and wood?
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Original wood (cell walls) is preserved by perminralization. If wood is replaced, no cellular detail remains.
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What taphonomic processes intervene between a living dinosaur and its fossils?
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...
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What effect do the taphonomic processes have on the information available to paleontologists?
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The taphonomic processes destroy information between the life of a dinosaur and the dinosaurs fossils we collect and study.
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What types of rocks and what types of sedimentary environments contain most dinosaur fossils.
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Most dinosaurs are found in fluvil sedimentary rocks. They are especially common in river floodplain deposits.
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What principles were used to develop the relative geologic time scale?
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Principle of Superposition, Principle of biostratigraphic correlation (biostratigraphy)
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Why is the relative geologic time scale useful?
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It is the basis for the original geologic time scale.
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What is the principle of superposition?
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The bottom rocks are typically older than the rocks on the top.
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What is the prionciple of biostratigraphic correlation (biostratigraphy)?
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Rocks containing the name types of fossils are assumed to be the same age.
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Compare and contrast the relative and numerical geologic time scales.
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Numerical time scale: attempts to put a specific age in years on the rocks and bones found in the earth. Generally however, it is difficult to specify dates more accurately than within about 5 million years Relative time scale: attempts to determine which rocks/events are older or younger than others.
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Why can't we assign precise numerical ages to all dinosaur fossils?
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We can only date igneous rocks(because most other rocks do not contain enough long-lasting radioactive material to be used for dating) and therefore assign approximate age brackets to the fossil-containing rocks based on the ages of nearby layers of igneous rock. Dinosaurs are not usualy found in igneous rock.
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When, in terms of the relative and the numerical time scales, did dinosaurs live?
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They lived during the Mesozoic era, which consisted of the Triassic, Jurassic, and cretaceous periods. The dinosaurs first appeared in the late Triassic about 228 million years ago, and died at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago.
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What is Paleosol?
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ground up fossils.
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How are radiometric ages obtained?
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Radioactive elements decay at different rates, measured in "half-lives" (the time it takesfor half of the amount to decay into the daughter element). by measuring the ratio of parent to daughter isotopes and knowing the half life of the element, you can determine about hoe much time has passed since the material was deposited.
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What does Carbon-14 dating do for dinosaur paleontologists?
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Carbon-14 works only for organic materials wood, bone, etc) also Carbon decays at a half-life measured in thousands of years, and therefor does not last nearly long enough to measure the vast stretches of time required for dating dinosaur fossils.
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Why can dinosaurs be called a subset of archosaurian diapsid reptiles?
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Archosaurs include the dinosaurs, a group called thecodonts. Dinosaurs also have two openings behind their eyes, which makes them diapsids.
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What is the significance of silesaurs?
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They are the closest non-dinosaurian relative.
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What is the Silesaur's relationship to dinosaurs?
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They may have shared a common ancestor
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Almost all of the diagnostic characters of dinosaurs are related to what posture?
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up-right, legs extended directly underneath the body.
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Why was the dinosaur posture beneficial?
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It allowed them to move quickly
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What clade(s) have the same posture as the dinosaurs?
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Mammals
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Why are cladists not satisfied with groups of animals like reptiles and thecodonts?
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Reptile refers both to a general clade including promotove reptiles and all their descendents (including, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, etc.), and to a specific clade existing today, to which mammals and birds do not belong.
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How do ankle structures of archosaurs provide a key to their phylogenetic relationships?
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They have the advanced metatarsal (AM) ankle, which is an evolutionary novelty. Enables the ankle to swing backwards and forwards in a straight line to enable speedy, upright wakling and running. This sets them appart from other clades. Other Thecodonts have twisting CN (crocodile Normal) ancles. the AM ankle sets them apart.
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What are the 7 rules of science?
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Reproducibility, predictive power, prospects for improvement, naturalism, uniformitarianism, simplicity.
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What is the rule of reproducibility?
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The experiment has to be able to be replicated exactly and get the same results. Someone has to be able to repeat it.
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What is the rule of predictive power?
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The results should generally be predicted before doing the experiment.
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What is the rule of prospects for improvement?
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It has room for refining. It has the potential to be built upon and have more knowledge be added into it.
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What is the rule of naturalism?
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Science is a way to explain things, So observations need to be explained in a natural way rather than a supernatural way.
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What is the rule of uniformitarianism?
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The same physical laws that we observe today have been in force forever. These physical laws have not changed.
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What is the law of Simplicity?
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Usually the simplest explanation is the right one. *Scientists assume that the things they study are simple enough for humans to understand.
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What is the rule of Harmony?
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Theories should generally agree with each other. Scientific explanations should not contradict each other.
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What is special about archosaur lungs?
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Unidirectional airflow (inhale/exhale same direction)
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What types of rocks can you radiometrically date?
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only igneous rocks (lava)
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What evolutionary novelty unites all dinosaurs?
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A crest on their humerous
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What is curation?
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Organizing (and usualy digitizing) all the information about the bones and the map of the quarry site, and preserving the specimens that have been found.
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Diapsid
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two holes in skull
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synapsid
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one hole in bottom of the skull
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Euriapside
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One hole in top of skull
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Anapsid
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no holes in skull
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What is the difference between the number of holes in the primitive and advanced creatures.
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The more primitive creatures had less holes in their skulls than the more advanced creatures like the dinosaurs.
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Explain the relationship between fluvial energy levels
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Larger particle sizes indicate a higher-energy environment....this includes floodplains and riverbeds.
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What does fluvial mean?
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produced by the action of a river or stream.
