...Before plants, the earth was a rather dull place. It is predicted that the plants changed land quite a lot. For example, before plants, rivers were thought to be broad, shallow, and laid down in wide, flat sheets. Then plants growing and roots spreading in these areas helped to transform the land into areas of mud with rivers in long continuous, and narrow channels. Bacteria started forming before plants, and it is believed that this bacteria is what began to pump oxygen into the atmosphere. About 2 billion years after bacteria started developing, was the rise of bryophytes descending from the green algae. This is believed to have happened about 409-354 million years ago. They lack lignified vascular tissue and therefore cannot grow to be very tall. Therefore it is believed that the bryophytes were very small and low to the ground. They also needed water to survive and were found most commonly in wet habitats. With the emergence of these basic plants, they were then able to provide more of a food source for early amphibians which evolved shortly after. Amphibians and insects evolved close in the same time-frame, along with early vascular land plants. The first vascular plants fossils appeared about 425 million years ago in rocks from middle Silurian. These plants had a few features that made them able to adapt well to life on land. First, the vascular systems abled them to transport water, nutrients and sugars much more efficiently. Also, they were able to synthesize...
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...___ Plant-animal co-evolution What is coevolution? Coevolution can be defined as evolution in two or more evolutionary entities brought about by mutual selective effect between the entities. This means the trait in specie one can affect the evolutionary pathway of specie two which in turn affect the evolutionary pathway of specie one. Coevolution interaction can be positive, neutral or negative. There are various examples that support coevolution. Examples: Plant pollinators, Batesian mimicry and predation. Positive interaction is when both parties benefit from coevolution. One interesting example of positive...
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...Kobie Lofton Mark Pachankis 2nd Period 12/1/15 Chapter Summaries Prologue Diamond wonders why Eurasia presided over other cultures. The question was answered with racial intelligence differences and environmental differences. He also talks about survival of the fittest. He says that intelligence is closely linked to human and cultural survival. All of these questions would be answered by the end of the book. Part One: - From Eden to Cajamarca Chapter 1. Up to the Starting Line Evolution is explained, relating us and our “ancestors” of many centuries ago. Primates such as gorillas are said to be our closest relatives. Africa presides as the homeland for all species. Neanderthals have always been viewed as mindless, mentally deranged creatures. Fifty years ago, The Great Leap Forward was like a big advancement in technology. Hominids also began to spread across New Guinea and Australia. The larger animals that failed to attain protection qualities against other predators during evolution died out and became extinct. Eurasia also occured. It became the more advanced between them and Africa, although Africa started out on top. Chapter 2. A Natural Experiment of History The Maori and Moriori descended from Polynesians,...
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...Chapter 29 Plant Diversity I: How Plants Colonized Land Review Questions Part I 1. The most recent common ancestor of all land plants was probably similar to modern-day members of which group? Charophytes. 2. The structural integrity of bacteria is to peptidoglycan as the structural integrity of plant spores is to sporopollenin. 3. Which kind of plant tissue should lack phragmoplasts? Tissues performing nuclear division without intervening cytokineses. 4. The following are common to both charophytes and land plants except lignin. 5. A number of characteristics are very similar between charophytes and members of the kingdom Plantae. Of the following, which characteristic does not provide evidence for a close evolutionary relationship between these two groups? Alternation of generations. 6. A researcher wants to develop a test that will distinguish charophytes and land plants from green algae. Which of the following chemicals would be the best subject for such an assay? Glycolate oxidasean peroxisomal enzyme that is associated with photorespiration. 7. In animal cells and in the meristem cells of land plants, the nuclear envelope disintegrates during mitosis. This disintegration does not occur in the cells of most protists and fungi. According to our current knowledge of plant evolution, which group of organisms should feature mitosis most similar to that of land plants? Charophytes. 8. On a field trip, a student in a marine biology class collects...
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...Lemurs in Madagascar Melissa Cotham SCI/275 September 8, 2013 Stacey Laub Lemurs in Madagascar 1. What are Madagascar’s biomes? Discuss the major features of at least one of these biomes. Use the textbook for biome examples. Madagascar’s biggest biome is a tropical rainforest. A tropical rainforest biome primarily consists of warm weather, wet plants, and fungi ridden soils. There are three important layers of a tropical rainforest. The emergent layer, 50 m up; where vegetation grows in full sunlight. The canopy (middle) layer, 3-40 m up; provides protection of too harsh of sun to low light plants below. Finally the understory (ground level) where plants and animals only receive 2-3 percent of light from above. 2. What changes happening in Madagascar are posing challenges for lemurs? Give details about the sources, time scale, and types of change. Changes happening in Madagascar that are posing threats are the rapid environmental changes caused by humans. The changes that which humans are making are for the ‘sake-of-human-kind’. Although these changes may benefit humans, we are depleting the resources of the lemurs. For example the bamboo lemur (that eats only bamboo); will no longer be in existence, once all of the bamboo tress has been destroyed. 3. Which types of lemurs are adapting to the changes? Which types of lemurs are not adapting well? Why? The lemurs that are adapting well are the lemurs with the ability to thrive in secondary habitats...
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...Biology 111 Article Review 1 Sea Slug Steals Photosynthesis Genes From Algae. Janet Fang in IFL Science; February 2015 Richard Johnson Friday, February 25, 2015 Instructor: Professor Seth Kraner The first multicellular animal that is now able to produce Chlorophyll and undergo photosynthesis is a slug! The slug’s actual name is Elysia chlorotica this slug is only found deep in the deep salt waters of New England and Canada. The article talks about various ways the slug is able to eat and survive. Scientists think that the slug adapted to its environment in order to survive. Some scientist thought the only reason the slugs are able to produce chlorophyll is because of all the algae the slugs eat. The scientists thought after they ate the algae they steal the made substance from the algae: This is not the case. After studies with a radioactive tracer scientists found astounding the slugs are actually producing the chlorophyll by themselves not by the stealing the algae that is already made. Elysia Chlorotica is using the algae’s plastid which does not completely contain the materials that are needed to undergo photosynthesis. Instead, the photosynthesized material are only found in the algae, only a few of the materials are found in the plastid. This slug can photosynthesize several months only using the plastid material; this includes when the animals is unable to find any algae. This is one most confusing findings that the researchers still cannot understand. Scientists found...
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...plants.Pleistocene conifers, mosses, flowering plants, insects, mollusks, birds, mammals (sloths, bison, sabre-toothed cats, mammoths, early human hunters). Diatoms, foraminifera, and plant pollen. | 1.8 MYA to today. | Yet the Holocene has witnessed all of humanity's recorded history and the rise and fall of all its civilizations. It was during the Pleistocene that the most recent episodes of global cooling, or ice ages, took place. Temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods. The Pleistocene also saw the evolution and expansion of our own species, Homo sapiens. | | Tertiary | Grazing mammals, such as members of the perissodactyl and artiodactyls diversified in the Miocene and Pliocene.Long legged grazers.Chalicotherium , perissodactyls. artiodactylsHyaenodon horridus, elephants, horses, various grassesUngulates such as Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla, Vivveravus | 65 to 1.8 MYA. | The cooling and drying of the global environment may have contributed to the enormous spread of grasslands in this time. The change in vegetation undoubtedly was a major factor in the rise of long-legged grazers who came to live in these areas. The Panamanian land-bridge between North and South America appeared during the Pliocene, allowing migrations of plants and animals. | MESOZOIC | Cretaceous | Some ceratopsian and pachycepalosaurid dinosaurs, non-avian dinosaurs, insects, mammals, ammonites, first flowering plants | 144 to 65 mya | "Age of Dinosaurs". The breakup...
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...orders, each order into families, each family into genera, and each genus into species. Living organisms are subdivided into 5 major kingdoms, including the Monera, the Protista, the Fungi, the Plantae, and the Animalia. Each kingdom is further subdivided into separate phyla or divisions. Generally "animals" are subdivided into phyla, while "plants" are subdivided into divisions. Organisms in any given Kingdom maybe separated from organisms in any other Kingdom by many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years of evolution. This book provides information about the five kingdoms of life. It will give you knowledge on how organisms grouped and classified. You will also learn the different microorganisms that do exist on Earth. Let yourself explore the world deeper Let yourself know beyond what you see. Let yourself discover about the… Five Kingdoms of Life.. ------------------------------------------------- Once upon a time, all living things were lumped together into two kingdoms, namely plants and animals. Animals included every living thing that moved, ate, and grew to a certain size and stopped growing. Plants included every living thing that did not move or eat and that continued to grow throughout life. It became very difficult to group some living things into one or the...
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...The Arctic and subarctic regions Compared with other biomes, the tundra biome is relatively young, having its origin in the Pleistocene (1,600,000 to 10,000 years ago). Individual plant and animal species of the tundra, however, probably first appeared in the Late Miocene (11.2 to 5.3 million years ago) or Early Pliocene (5.3 to 3.4 million years ago). Coniferous forests were present on Ellesmere Island and in northern Greenland, the northernmost land areas, in the mid-Pliocene (2.5 million years ago). Most paleoecologists believe that tundra flora evolved from plants of the coniferous forests and alpine areas as continents drifted into higher and cooler latitudes during the Miocene (23.7 to 5.3 million years ago). The Antarctic region Antarctica has been isolated from other continental landmasses by broad expanses of ocean since early in the Tertiary Period, about 60 to 40 million years ago. Prior to its separation it existed, along with Australia, South America, peninsular India, and Africa, as part of the landmass known as Gondwanaland. This long separation has impeded the establishment and development of land-based flora and fauna in the Antarctic. Other significant factors that have hampered terrestrial biotic evolution are the harsh climate, the ice cover that completely engulfed the continent during the Pleistocene glaciations, and the present limited number of ice-free land areas, which are restricted primarily to the coastal fringes and nunataks (mountain peaks surrounded...
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...Plant Diversity Paper Plants are extremely diverse multicellular photosynthetic organisms whose evolution can be traced back to one common ancestor. This common ancestor would most likely be some variation of the common day green algae. Even though these green algae are only modicums of modern day plants they still contain the most important characteristic of all, the ability to photosynthesize. Photosynthesis is the ability to take in water, carbon dioxide, and solar energy and convert it into glucose. Any plants that appear green contain a photon absorbing pigment known as chlorophyll, which is essential to absorb light. The first plants, such as algae and kelp, most likely lived in aquatic environments. However plant’s evolutionary history shows that they made the challenging transition from sea to land in favor of less competition for sunlight and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide. At this time all photosynthetic plants lived in marine environments. This resulted in all of these amphibious plants competing for the best environments to collect the optimum amount of sunlight. This in turn caused a struggle for many of these plants to collect their required sunlight for photosynthesis. At the same time aquatic plants were also consuming too much carbon dioxide as a result of living in the same habitats. Carbon dioxide also diffuses easier in air than in water, which made carbon dioxide more readily accessible on land than in water. These two reasons were...
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...Endangered species Extinction is actually a normal process in the course of evolution. To date, many species of animals have become extinct rather than the total numbers that exist. These species slowly disappeared because of climatic changes and the inability to adapt to such conditions as competition and predation. Since the 1600s, however, the process of extinction has accelerated rapidly through the impact of both human population growth and technological advances on natural ecosystems. Due to the rapid changing of the environment by fast growing human technology, many animals unable to adapt to these changes fast are dying a relatively fast death. Just to illustrate the degree of loss of species we're facing, let’s take you through one scientific analysis: * The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. * These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year. * If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true - i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet** - then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. * But if the upper estimate of species numbers is true - that there are 100 million different species co-existing with us on our planet - then between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year. How you understand, every year...
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...group of plants? 3. What group of gymnosperms is most closely related to angiosperms? 4. Fill in the table. Plant | Number of Cotyledons | Arrangement of Vascular Tissue | Vein Pattern | Number of Petals | Root | Monocot | | | | | | Dicot | | | | | | 5. What is the difference between xylem and phloem? 6. What kind of tissue is responsible for growth? 7. What are the 4 whorls of a flower? What is the purpose of each? a. b. c. d. 8. Explain the process of alteration of generations. 9. _____________ _____________ occurs when the pollen tube releases two ________ into the female gametophyte within the __________. One sperm ______________ the egg and the other combines with two _____________ in the central cell of the female gametophyte and initiates development of the food-storing _________________. 10. What is the purpose of fruit and nectar? 11. I am a white flower with a fruity odor that only opens at night. I have abundant, hidden nectar. How am I likely pollinated? 12. I am a bright red flower with no odor that only opens during the day. I have ample hidden nectar. How am I likely pollinated? 13. I am a brown flower that is open all day long. I have no odor or nectar. How am I likely pollinated? 14. What are the two key adaptations of angiosperms? 15. Name three reasons plants are important to humans. 16. What are the 5 key achievements in plant evolution...
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...History of Evolution The word "evolution" in its broadest sense refers to change or growth that occurs in a particular order. Although this broad version of the term would include astronomical evolution and the evolution of computer design, this article focuses on the evolution of biological organisms. That use of the term dates back to the ancient Greeks, but today the word is more often used to refer to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. This theory is sometimes crudely referred to as the theory of "survival of the fittest." It was proposed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, independently, by Alfred Wallace in 1858—although Wallace, unlike Darwin, said the human soul is not the product of evolution. Greek and medieval references to "evolution" use it as a descriptive term for a state of nature, in which everything in nature has a certain order or purpose. This is a teleological view of nature. For example, Aristotle classified all living organisms hierarchically in his great scala naturae or Great Chain of Being, with plants at the bottom, moving through lesser animals, and on to humans at the pinnacle of creation, each becoming progressively more perfect in form. It was the medieval philosophers, such as Augustine, who began to incorporate teleological views of nature with religion: God is the designer of all creatures, and everything has a purpose and a place as ordained by Him. In current times, to some, the terms "evolution" and "God"...
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...What is evolution? Providing a definition of “evolution” is tricky because the word is used in different ways. First we need to distinguish between the broader worldview some associate with evolution and the scientific theory of evolution. The theory of evolution by natural selection, first formulated in Charles Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will help it survive and have more offspring. The theory of evolution is based on the idea that all species are related and gradually change over time. Evolution relies on there being genetic variation in a population which affects the physical characteristics (phenotype) of an organism. Some of these characteristics may give the individual an advantage over other individuals which they can then pass on to their offspring. Evolution by natural selection is one of the best substantiated theories in the history of science, supported by evidence from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including paleontology, geology, genetics and...
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...ENG121 Evolution vs. Creationism The debate between evolutionism and creationism began thousands of years ago and the battle between the two streams of thought continues to this day. While creationists believe in a god who is the absolute creator of heaven and earth less than 10,000 years ago, evolutionists believe that the universe began billions of years ago with life started as just a single cell bacteria evolving slowly into everything we see today. “What’s the difference between creationism and evolution?” Charles Darwin’s work on evolution is the most recognized throughout history and the evidence that he discovered supporting evolution changed how many people viewed the history of our universe. His main research project was on a process called natural selection, the idea that survival of the fittest has been a main determinant is shaping how the earth and all living things appear today. Charles Darwin discuses this idea of Natural Selection in his essay “Natural Selection”, detailing evidence supporting his theory. This paper will discuss Darwin’s essay but will also go into further detail of his discoveries, other evolutionary milestones and finally comparing and contrasting the evolutionary argument to the creationism point of view. The idea of evolution first came about in the 1600’s when European naturalists started to question the current theories about how our universe was created. In 1666 the first evidence of evolution was discovered when a couple of fishermen...
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