Broad Patterns of Evolution

Name the term: the amount of time it takes for 50% of a sample of a radioactive isotope to decay.

Name the term: the elimination of a large number of species throughout Earth, the result of global environmental changes.

Name the term: evolutionary change in the timing or rate of an organism's development.

Name the term: the continents are part of great plates of Earth's crust that flow on hot, underlying portion of the mantle; movements in the mantle cause the continents to move slowly over time.

Name the term: layered rock that results from the activities of prokaryotes that bind thin films of sediment together.

Name the term: the retention in an adult organism of the juvenile features of its evolutionary ancestors

Name the term: method used to determine the age of rocks based on the half-life of radioactive isotopes.

Name the term: the supercontinent that forms near the end of the Paleozoic era, when plate movements for all the land masses of Earth together.

Name the term: any of the master regulatory genes that control placement and spatial organization of body parts in animals, plants, and fungi by controlling the developmental fate of groups of cells

Name the term: a standard time scale dividing Earth's history into time periods, grouped into four eons—Hadean, Archaean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic—and further subdivided into eras, periods, and epochs.