Past life forms and their features

The current behavior of living animals

The exact DNA sequence of extinct species

The present-day climate of an area

Continents were once connected (continental drift)

Fossils can move across oceans on their own

Modern species recently migrated worldwide

Fossils are always younger than surrounding rock

A mass extinction event

Gradual evolutionary change over millions of years

Fossil contamination from other layers

Improved preservation in deeper layers

Provide direct evidence of evolutionary change between groups

Prove that species never change over time

Show that fossils form only in deserts

Always preserve soft tissues

Correlating and dating rock layers of the same age

Showing the diet of extinct animals

Determining the color of ancient plants

Reconstructing the exact lifespan of an individual

The Law of Superposition

The Principle of Uniformity

The Theory of Fossilization

Radioactive decay

Gradual evolution by small changes over time

That the species was created exactly the same each generation

That fossils from different layers are the same age

That all changes occur in one generation

Less than about 50,000 years old

Hundreds of millions of years old

Older than the Earth

Always exactly 1,000 years old

Those organisms lived at the same time and may share ancestry or environments

That fossils determine exact body color of species

That rock layers cannot be compared geographically

That fossils are unrelated to past environments

They decay rapidly and lack hard parts needed for preservation

They never lived in environments that produce rocks

Soft tissues always turn into diamonds

They are too recent to fossilize