Paleontology Questions

Ornithopod skulls are ______________, that is, slight movements of individual bones within the skull and lower jaws allow the cheek teeth to grind from side to side.

Some of the larger ornithopods, such as Iguanodon, may have functioned as full-time

_____________ extinctions involve many types of species undergoing global extinction in a geologically short period of time.

_________________ are plants with large, pineapple-like trunks and bunches of leaves springing out of their tops.

Throughout ornithopod evolution, the teeth became more tightly packed, culminating in the lambeosaur

Organisms that first colonize deserted ecospace are termed ________________ and are known in vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant communities.

An evolutionary advantage, such as having better-designed limbs and more efficient terrestrial locomotion, is called

Hadrosaurid remains include delicate skull bones such as _____________ which supported the relatively large eyeballs (implying acute vision).

Oryctodromeus raised atricial young in a burrow and had digging specializations in its skull and thoracic region suggesting a(n)

Patterns of _______________ - who made it across the K-Pg boundary and who did not - shed light upon events 66.1 Ma.

There are no credible post K-Pg records for _______________, the long-necked, fish-eating diapsids of the Jurassic and Cretaceous.

The asteroid that struck the Earth would have caused a blockage of sunlight, stopping photosynthesis and decreasing global temperatures, called a(n) ___________ winter.

In Iguanodon the middle digits of the hand were tipped with ____________ and were evidently weight-bearing for when the animal was in a quadrupedal stance.

Large sauropods may have relied upon a strategy called _______________, where small surface-to-volume ratios allowed them to retain core heat and maintain homeothermy without the cost of true endothermy.

If the marine microscopic, shelled, single-celled organisms live in the water column, they are planktonic; If they live within sediments, they are

_______________ are the flowering plants, which today consist of magnolias, maples, grasses, roses, and orchids, among many other groups.

________________ is the evolution of one group affecting the evolution of another, as in the rise of angiosperms happening at about the same time as several major radiations of dinosaur groups took place.

_____________ extinctions are isolated extinctions of species that occur in an ongoing fashion.

There may have been multiple migrations of herds of dinosaurs across a(n) _____________ land bridge from Asia to North America throughout much of the Late Cretaceous.

______________ are marine microscopic, shelled, single-celled organisms with a rich fossil record.