Image: Andy Crawford/Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images
About This Quiz
When you think about fossils, you probably picture the big-money stuff: T-Rex skeletons, perfectly preserved mammoths and the like. Compared to them, the vast majority of fossils are relatively tiny and seemingly insignificant.
A preserved piece of a plant or animal can officially be called a fossil if it's more than how many years old?
1,000
10,000
It's kind of arbitrary, but the specimen has to be 10,000 years old to earn the title of fossil. If it's younger than that, it's just a plain old bone, we guess.
100,000
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What's the fossil record?
a list of the oldest fossilized specimens that have been found for each species
a database of all the species that have ever existed
all the fossils that have ever been discovered
The fossil record is the total of all the fossils that have ever been found -- basically, it's the sum total of all paleontological information.
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About how far back does the fossil record go?
550 million years
1 billion years
3 billion years
The earliest known fossils are about 3 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million years. But fossils from that far back are pretty much only from microscopic bacteria.
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According to the information we have from the fossil record, about how old is the Earth?
4.5 billion years old
Using radiometric dating and a whole bunch of other scientific methods -- most significantly, the dating of the oldest known meteorite particles -- scientists have determined that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
3 billion years old
2.5 billion years old
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What do paleontologists use mass spectrometers for?
finding the location of a fossil encased in amber
determining a fossil's age
Mass spectrometers examine a fossil's isotopes for radiometric dating, which determines the fossil's age.
separating a fossil from the rock that surrounds it
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What's a transitional fossil?
a fossil of indeterminate age
a fossil that doesn't look like one specific animal
Transitional fossils have characteristics of more than one animal -- a kind of in-between stage, if you will. Scientists have used them as evidence of evolution.
a fossil that isn't fully preserved
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How old are the oldest human fossils?
195,000 years old
When "Omo I" and "Omo II" were discovered in Ethiopia in 1967, scientists thought they were 130,000 years old. In 2005, thanks to improved dating techniques, they were found to be 195,000 years old.
255,000 years old
305,000 years old
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What's a living fossil?
an animal that very closely resembles an ancient, fossilized animal
Horseshoe crabs and nautiluses are two examples of living fossils -- animals that had been known only as fossils before the modern-day species was discovered.
an animal that can live hundreds of years
a modern species whose ancestors have never been found in a fossilized state
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In February 2009, paleontologists unearthed a 60-million-year-old snake -- the largest on record. How much would it have weighed when it was living?
900 pounds
1,400 pounds
2,500 pounds
The snake, discovered in Colombia, probably weighed about 2,500 pounds (1,140 kilograms).
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Where is "Dinosaur City," the world's largest fossil site?
Siberia
China
As of early 2009, about 7,600 dinosaur bones had been found at a site in the Chinese province of Shandong.
Libya
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You Got:
/10
Andy Crawford/Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images
