Make sure you have understood everything in this section (Lessons E14, E15, E16, E17, and E18).
Use the Self-Check below, and the Self-Check & Lesson Review Tips to guide your learning.
This is also a good time to visit your Section 4 Checklist to make sure you have completed all the recommended learning activities.

Unit E Section 4 Self-Check

Instructions


Complete the following 6 steps. Don't skip steps – if you do them in order, you will confirm your understanding of this section and create a study bank for the future.

  1. DOWNLOAD the self-check quiz by clicking here.

  2. ANSWER all the questions on the downloaded quiz in the spaces provided. Think carefully before typing your answers. Review the lessons of this section if you need to. Save your quiz when you are done.

  3. COMPARE your answers with the suggested "Self-Check Quiz Answers" below. WAIT! You didn't skip step 2, did you? It's very important to carefully write out your own answers before checking the suggested answers.

  4. REVISE your quiz answers if you need to. If you answered all the questions correctly, you can skip this step. Revise means to change, fix, and add extra notes if you need to. This quiz is NOT FOR MARKS, so it is perfectly OK to correct any mistakes you made. This will make your self-check quiz an excellent study tool you can use later.

  5. SAVE your quiz to a folder on your computer, or to your Private Files. That way you will know where it is for later studying.

  6. CHECK with your teacher if you need to. If after completing all these steps you are still not sure about the questions or your answers, you should ask for more feedback from your teacher. To do this, post in the Course Questions Forum, or send your teacher an email. In either case, attach your completed quiz and ask; "Can you look at this quiz and give me some feedback please?" They will be happy to help you!

Self-Check Time!

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Self-Check Quiz Answers

Click each of the suggested answers below, and carefully compare your answers to the suggested answers.

If you have not done the quiz yet – STOP – and go back to step 1 above. Do not look at the answers without first trying the questions.

Earth has a long history of lifeforms, but the conditions necessary for fossils are quite rare. In addition, Earth’s crust is changing constantly as mountains are built, tectonic plates smash together, and volcanoes cover the landscape with lava. The fossils we find are in rock that has remained relatively protected; then, the fossils have been exposed at the surface by erosion or some sort of crust movement. The process of forming a fossil, keeping it together for very long periods of time, then having it revealed without it being destroyed is a very rare event.
Science had considered dinosaurs to be scaly reptiles for many years because of the resemblance between dinosaurs and today’s reptiles. When something new is observed on a fossilized organism, such as these primitive feathers on a dinosaur, paleontologists rethink their inferences. Biologists are very important in this discovery because paleontologists want to know how the dinosaur feather evidence they found compares to modern-day birds. If the comparison is observed to be very close, inferences about the ancient fossilized dinosaurs can be based on the birds of today.
The Cambrian explosion is thought to be the time that ancestors of all Earth’s current life first appeared. According to the fossil record, few complex life forms existed before the Cambrian explosion of life. This is why the Mistaken Point Precambrian fossils are so important to paleontologists. By studying the fossils from Marble Canyon, the Burgess Shale, and Mistaken Point, paleontologists are believed to be studying the very beginnings of complex life on our planet.
The sedimentary rock layers under Alberta are much deeper closer to the Rocky Mountains. If you think of the North American tectonic plate as a concrete swimming pool deep below us, the deep end is near the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary while the shallow end is in the northeast, past Fort McMurray. When the Rocky Mountains formed, some of the very deep sedimentary layers were pushed up and became the sides of some of the mountains, exposing ancient rocks such as the Burgess Shale. The Badlands near Drumheller are exposed because of erosion, and because there are fewer sedimentary layers, the fossils there are from more recent history.
To predict what Earth will be like 100 million years from now is difficult, but humans will leave some amazing fossils. Billions of humans will have lived on Earth by then, and we build many things and change the surface of Earth in many ways. Likely, finding human fossils will be easier in the future than finding fossils of ancient organisms from the past. ... and, yes, we bury piles of garbage, some of which might puzzle those future archaeologists!