A Study Guide for the Earth & Life Through Time Midterm 2

Midterm 2 is a multiple choice exam consisting of 30 questions and offered on line through your Vista/BB account. Check your syllabus and course materials folder for the dates it is offered.   It is an open book/open notes exam, and is timed for one hour from beginning to end.  The questions will be drawn randomly from a pool of questions on the material covered in Weeks 6 through 9, Lectures 9-16 and the text and on-line reading.  A few questions in the pool are drawn from the same questions as in the quiz pool. 

                The best way to prepare for the midterm is to review your lecture topic summaries and your quizzes, and to review the key figures and chapter summaries in the textbook.  The topic summaries and quizzes are a built-in study guide for this course.  If you find you need more guidance, I suggest you organize your notes, thoughts, and study efforts around these areas:

I.                    The Early Paleozoic Fossil Record and Mountain Building Events

a.        What was the “Cambrian Explosion”?

b.      Which organisms formed the first large reefs of the Cambrian Period?

c.       What are the Burgess Shale Fauna and the Chengjiang Fauna?

d.      What are the three mountain building events that built the Appalachian Mountains?

e.      When did the three mountain building event s of the Appalachians occur?

f.        What happened on the western coast of North America during the early Paleozoic?

g.       Which geologic time periods are important for the mineral wealth of Ohio, and what mineral wealth does Ohio have?

II.                  The Late Paleozoic Fossil Record and Mountain Building Events

a.        What is Pangaea?  What is Gondwanaland?  What is Laurasia?

b.      Why did oxygen levels rise from Devonian through Pennsylvanian time, and then drop in the Permian and Triassic time?

c.       How do leaf stomata tell us about past climate?

d.      What are Synapsids and Therapsids?

e.      What are Archosaurs?

f.        What is the link between the rise in oxygen and gigantism in insects?

g.       Why is there so much coal in the Pennsylvanian Period?

III.              The Mesozoic Fossil Record

a.        What are the scientific hypotheses offered to explain the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Cretaceous-Paleogene (aka Tertiary) extinction event?

b.      What are features of Ichthyosaur evolution?

c.       What is the link between dinosaurs and modern birds?

d.      How often has flight developed in the entire Phanerozoic?

e.      Flying reptiles and Marine reptiles:  are they dinosaurs? Why not?

f.        How do sauropods differ from theropods?

g.       What factors drove diversity in the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic?

IV.               Mesozoic Mountain Building and Tectonic Activity

a.        What kind of plate boundary formed along the eastern margin of North America in the Triassic?

b.      What 3 mountain building events occurred in western North America during the Mesozoic that resulted in the Cordilleran Mountain belt?

c.       When did the 3 mountain building events of the Cordilleran System occur?

d.      How did the Cretaceous interior seaway form?  What ecological impact did it have?

e.      What was the Tethys Seaway, and why is it important in oil production?

f.        Where was India when the Deccan Traps flood basalts formed?

g.        What is the significance of the Iridium in the K-Pg boundary clays?

h.      Which animal groups were hardest hit in the K-Pg extinction event?

i.         What evidence indicates the Earth was hit by a large meteorite at the Chicxulub, Yucatan site?