Lab 7. Fossils of the Paleozoic & Paleoecology
Printer-friendly worksheets for Lab 7
Note: For this lab, questions are interspersed within the text of the lab rather than separated into Exercise sections. Use the worksheets to make sure you have answered all of the questions.
Time Interval
Goals
By the end of this lab you will:
- Understand the life habit of organisms
- Understand how fossils are used in paleoecology.
- Be able to identify some marine fossils from the Paleozoic.
Introduction
In Lab 5, you examined how fossils are preserved in the rock record and gained some appreciation for the body materials that are preserved. In Lab 6, you examined organisms which emerged during the Precambrian and the early Cambrian. This lab will introduce you to more of the main fossils of the Paleozoic Era.
Fossils are used in stratigraphy as a means of correlating sediments, and for dating sediments. Fossils are also used to help determine the sedimentary facies through the study of paleoecology. Paleoecology is the examination of fossils to understand past ecosystems. An understanding of where organisms lived (habit) and how those organisms fed themselves (function in the ecosystem) can assist in determining the type of environment that they came from.