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The simplest definition of "paleontology" is "the study of ancient life". [5] The field seeks information about several aspects of past organisms: "their identity and origin, their environment and evolution, and what they can tell us about the Earth's organic and inorganic past".
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Hence, paleontology overlaps with geology (the study of rocks and rock formations) as well as with botany, biology, zoology and ecology – fields concerned with life forms and how they interact. The major subdivisions of paleontology include paleozoology (animals), paleobotany (plants) and micropaleontology (microfossils).
The outcome of evolution is not a perfectly designed organism. The end products of natural selection are organisms that are adapted to their present environments. Natural selection does not involve progress towards an ultimate goal. Evolution does not strive for more advanced, more intelligent, or more sophisticated life forms. [25]
Also in 2016, Quizlet launched "Quizlet Live", a real-time online matching game where teams compete to answer all 12 questions correctly without an incorrect answer along the way. [15] In 2017, Quizlet created a premium offering called "Quizlet Go" (later renamed "Quizlet Plus"), with additional features available for paid subscribers.
Wilhelm T. Preyer, a pioneer of child psychology, was heavily inspired by Darwin's work and approached the mental development of children from an evolutionary perspective. [ 14 ] However, evolutionary theory has had a limited impact on developmental psychology as a whole, [ 5 ] and some authors argue that even its early influence was minimal ...
In archaeology and paleontology a faunal assemblage is a group of animal fossils found together in a given stratum. [1] In a non-deformed deposition, fossils are organized by stratum following the laws of uniformitarianism [2] and superposition, [3] which state that the natural phenomena observable today (such as death, decay, or post-mortem transport) also apply to the paleontological record ...
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...