Describe the information that fossils can provide.

What is the difference between relative dating and absolute dating?

Describe two major biological developments of the Mesozoic era.

Describe the contributions of Hutton and Lyell.

Fossils give us information about how animals and plants lived in the past.

The difference between relative dating and absolute dating is that relative dating is a method of sequencing events in the order in which they happened. Absolute dating is a method of estimating the age of a rock sample in years via radiometric techniques.

The Mesozoic Era is an interval of geological time from about 250 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. It is often referred to as the age of reptiles because reptiles, namely dinosaurs, were the dominant terrestrial and marine vertebrates of the time. The era began in the wake of the Permian-Triassic event and ended with the Cretaceous-Paleogene event.

Both James Hutton and Charles Lyell are considered the fathers of uniformitarianism geology. Uniformitarianism geology is all that has been taught since shortly after the word geology was coined in 1778. Although catastrophism geology is alive and well among many geologists, currently the word geology connotes uniformitarianism.