57: (Tools of the Trade) Evolution Part II - Paleontological applications
- Page ID
- 22727
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At end end of this chapter, students should be able to:
- Describe the development of the use of fossils as evolutionary tools.
- Identify major patterns seen in the fossil record as a result of evolutionary change.
- Describe the basics of cladistic analysis using fossils.
- Understand the connections between speciation and extinction.
- Identify several important mass extinction events in the Earth’s past.
- Discuss the difference between background extinction and mass extinction.
“The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically “sudden” origins at single bedding planes.”
— Stephen J. Gould, “Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle”, 1987