5.2

PART 1: Linnaeus Classification

This was created by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. His system was based on the physical and structural features of an organism, and the more features the organisms have that are similar the more common they are which leads to taxonomy which we looked at before.

We also looked at identifying species with their scientific name which is made up of two parts: Species name and Genus name. actually genus comes first my bad. This is binomial nomenclature which is just a fancy word of saying the process of which scientists assign organisms names so that they can have their own little crazy language in between eachother.

An example we can use is whales, just cause it's straight out of the text book :)

A whale is a fish, we all know that... i reaaaally hope. But another thing i hope everyone knows is that there is many different sorts of whales. The Bowhead Whale is called Balaena Mysticetus. a way that we know that is his features. Features that the Balaena Mysticetus has are baleen plates and no dorsal fin and that is the start to identifying this type of whale. A whale that has teeth and a large dorsal fin would be the Orincus Orca or in more normal terms the famous killer whale. And so on and on we go naming the fish, and bears, and bird, and all organisms like this. but i bet it gets a whole lot more complicated then just saying whether it has teeth or a fin.

PART 2: Paleontology

Definition: the study of fossils.

sounds simple huh? well its definetly not. i wanted to be a paleontologist when i was little, turns out its alot of school, but it sounds fun. So how does paleontology fit into evolution? well evolution is can not even be possible without paleontology. Scientists have found approximately 250 000 fossils, some of which have helped us figure out how us humans got here.

okay so you can't see the picture too well but those skulls are from our anscestors. you can't see well but if you look closely you can see that some of the skulls higher up on the tree have the genus names Homo which is our genus name so that is when you can start to see the direct link in where humans really started to become a species. the ones with the same genus names as us tells us alot about our evolution and how our bodies and skills came about. point is we wouldn't know any of that without paleontology because then we would have no fossils to even figure this out. and thanks to those who came up with the tecnology to learn all this as well, we have to credit you as well.

PART 3: Radiometric dating (Sorry is your getting bored Mrs.Rowswell but remember you are the one who assigned this project!)

Here is alittle background knowledge (history grossss)

-1800 Sir Charles Lyell was a geologist who wrote a book - Principles of Geology - and he estimated that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old. He made his theory off of fossil deposits and geological processes like erosion.

-Lord Kevin decided that this was wrong and said the earth was only 15-20 million because he did some science/math and came up with that and people beleived him because it was more agreable with the beleifs at the time.

-1903 radioactivity was discovered.

okay so what the heck is radioactivity? Lord Kevinassumed that the Earth was gradually cooling down, but his theory failed because he did not look at the heat that is generated within the earth from radioactive decay. The way we figured out the age of the earth is because Radioactive decay gives some form of geologic clock so that scientists can pin point the age of the earth, another huge part of evolution.

Here's a little Chemistry lesson: Radioactive decay changes parent isotope which is an atom into a daughter isotope which can be of the same of different element. Here are some examples from the textbook: radioactive potassium 40 decays so it will become argon 40 or another element like calcium 40. My biology call looked at this graph which looks at half-lives whihc is just the units that measures the rate of decay, its the amount it takes for half of the isotope to decay and become stable and i think that means the time all the parent isotopes turn into the daughther isotope but they just have a specific was to calculate it called half-lives.

Scientists have also learned that isotopes are a constant which means they arn't affected by certain conditions like temperature, moisture, or other environmental conditions. With constant half-lives isotopes are used as naturally occuring and precise radiometric clocks.

I kindof got off topic and forgot what i was actually suppose to talk about but here is radiometric dating (definition): a technique used to determine the age of a rock or fossil. so paleontolists can determine the age of a rock with radiometric dating which is used from the data of variety of isotopes that are combined.

PART 4: Biogeography

Definition: the study of the geographic distribution of life on earth.

this is used to determine different patterns on earth and the history of life on earth. Scientists look at fossils that can be as old as 150 million years back when one giant land mass split into a bunch of what we know now as the continents. they look at how the species evolved when their conditions changed.

Well that was very long but there is much more to come :)