Q 01/05

The word fossil comes from a Latin word meaning what?

A) Obtained by digging

B) Turned into stone

C) Very ancient thing

D) Buried animal bone

Answer · why

A) Obtained by digging

Obtained by digging. In the 1600s a fossil was anything dug out of the ground, coal and salt included; the word narrowed to the remains of ancient lif...

Q 02/05

What is the scientific study of fossils called?

A) Archaeology

B) Petrology

C) Paleontology

D) Anthropology

Answer · why

C) Paleontology

Paleontology. As a science it began in the 1790s with a startling proof drawn from fossil skeletons: whole species, the mammoth among them, had vanish...

Q 03/05

Specimens are sometimes only counted as fossils once they are older than roughly what age?

A) 100 years

B) 1,000 years

C) 10,000 years

D) 1 million years

Answer · why

C) 10,000 years

10,000 years. The line is a convention, and nothing says a fossil must have turned to stone: a mammoth preserved in ice counts, while younger remains ...

Q 04/05

About how old are the oldest widely accepted fossils on Earth?

A) 600 million years

B) 1.5 billion years

C) 3.5 billion years

D) 10 billion years

Answer · why

C) 3.5 billion years

3.5 billion years. Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, so life was under way about a billion years after the planet formed, and older chemica...

Q 05/05

Which technique, developed in the early 20th century, gives rocks an absolute age?

A) Tree-ring dating

B) Stratigraphy

C) Fossil correlation

D) Radiometric dating

Answer · why

D) Radiometric dating

Radiometric dating. Radioactive elements decay at fixed, known rates, so the ratio of an element to its decay products works as a clock; it stretched ...