Following is an outline of information from the first semester. Words in blue refer to second half of semester. Perhaps this will be useful in organizing your thoughts. [The following list is meant merely as a convenience and is not necessarily a completely comprehensive list of every single thing that one might encounter on the final exam.]

Major intervals in history of life: know basically what happened:

Precambrian: world dominated by bacteria, unicellular eukaryotes (lectures 4-5)

Late Precambrian-Cambrian transition: origin and diversification of animals (lectures 6-8)

Ordovician to Devonian: origin and diversification of typical “Paleozoic” marine fauna and of simple land plants and invertebrate animals (lectures 9-11)

Late Devonian to Permian: diversification of land animals and plants, including amphibians and reptiles and forests (lectures 11-12)

Permian-Triassic mass extinction (lectures 12-13)

Triassic to Cretaceous: diversification of dinosaurs & other large reptiles, origin of mammals, birds, flowering plants, and the “modern” marine fauna (lectures 17 to 26)

Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction: extinction of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, ammonites, rudist bivalves, etc (lectures 23, 26)

Tertiary-Quaternary: diversification of mammals, origin of hominids (lectures 19, 26-28)

Organisms to be familiar with:

Prokaryotes, eukaryotes (lecture 5)

Brachiopods, trilobites, corals, sea lilies; arthropods (lectures 8-10)

Fish: jawless fish, placoderms, lung-fish, sharks, bony fish (esp lecture 10)

Amphibians, reptiles; among the reptiles, “mammal-like reptiles” (lecture 11-12)

Dinosaurs (lectures 17-18, 21-23)

Marine reptiles: ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs (lecture 24)

Clams, snails, crabs, lobsters, bony fish (esp lectures 24, 26)

Gymnosperms (conifers) and Angiosperms (flowering plants) (lecture 20)

Pterosaurs (lecture 25)

Primitive birds (lecture 25)

Mastodons and mammoths (lectures 19, 27)

Hominids (lecture 28)

Processes to be familiar with in a vary general way:

Plate tectonics (lecture 10,12)

Sedimentation (lecture 2)

Sea level change (lecture 10,12)

Glaciation (esp lecture 6, 28)

Measurement of geologic time, stratigraphy (lecture 3)

Evolution (lectures 25-26)

Extinction (lectures 12, 23, 28)

Basis for interpretation, kinds of observations

Fossils, fossil record (lecture 1 and throughout)

Instances of exceptional preservation (soft-bodied preservation, chert, ice) (esp lectures 8, 10,27)

Diversity, disparity, body plans (esp lecture 7, 8), phyla....species (throughout)

Geochemical evidence of various kinds (brief examples given throughout)

Sediment characteristics, grain size (lecture 1, 10, 27)

Traces of moving organisms, such as footprints (lectures 17-18, 21-22)

Taphonomy: what happens to organism between death and fossilization (like forensic medicine) (lecture 27)

Famous localities, examples

Ediacaran fauna (Late Proterozoic, Australia) (lecture 6)

Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian, Canada) (esp. lecture 8)

Chengjiang Fauna (Early Cambrian, China) (esp. lecture 8)

Rhynie Chert (Early Devonian land flora, Scotland) (lecture 10)

Devonian sequence (Devonian, central and western NY) (lecture 9, 10)

Solnhofen limestone (Jurassic, Germany) (lecture 24, 25)

Morrison Formation (Jurassic, western U.S.) (lecture 18) [this contains numerous dinosaur bones, but does not have unusual preservation]

Hell Creek Formation (Late Cretaceous, western U.S.) (lectures 22, 23) [this contains numerous dinosaur bones, but does not have unusual preservation]

Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (latest Pleistocene, Siberia) (lecture 27)

Concepts that make science of paleontology possible (lecture 1 and throughout)

Using observations of present processes and observations of consequences, in order to infer processes from observations from evidence from rocks: “Present is the key to the past”

Assuming that physical laws have not changed through time (uniformitarianism)

Assuming that sediments have been deposited close to horizontally (“Principle of horizontality”), with younger sediments on top (“Principle of Superposition”)

Using multiple lines of independent evidence to draw most confident explanations for past events: “Confluence of evidence”

Researching hypotheses that can be confirmed or denied – “testable”

Process of science

Useful scientific hypotheses are testable and explain a wide body of evidence

Not all hypotheses that are interesting or true are testable with current evidence

Scientists challenge each other’s work in peer review before papers are published

News reports about new paleontological discoveries are often based on articles in one of a few scientific journals, especially the magazines Science and Nature

Press releases before any kind of peer review are usually frowned upon

The kind of discoveries that make the news have more to do with public interest than the actual amount of scientific study going on in a field