Mass extinctions have occurred repeatedly during the course of Earth's history. One of these events occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period, during which the dinosaurs became extinct. Mammals flourished after the dinosaurs were gone. This led to a variety of genetically diverse species. Why did the mammals suddenly start diverging into different species after the dinosaurs were gone?

Most of the predators were gone and suddenly niches were available so almost all the offspring were likely to survive and reproduce.
Once the dinosaurs were gone, the mammals started having larger numbers of offspring in each litter to fill the empty niches.
The mammals chose to move into the vacant niches the dinosaurs had occupied and change their body shapes to suit these new environments.
Mammals began mutating rapidly once the dinosaurs died out and were able to create new species based on the mutations.

Chapter 11.1 & 11.2 notes section 11.1 1. every living thing has a set of ? inherited from its parents. 2. after becoming a ? , mendel spent several years studying ? and mathematics at the university of vienna. 3. during sexual reproduction, male and female reproductive cells join, a process known as ? . 4. pea flowers are normally ? , which means that sperm cells in pollen fertilize the egg cells in the ? flowers. 5. when mendel crossed plants with ? characters for the same trait, the resulting offspring had only one of the characters. 6. a ? is a specific characteristic, such as seed color or plant height, that varies from one individual to another. 7. filius and filia are the latin words for ? and ? . 8. the offspring of crosses between parents with different traits are called ? . 9.to mendel's surprise, all of the offspring had the character of only ? of the parents. 10. mendel's first conclusion was that biological inheritance is determined by ? that are ? from one generation to the next. 11. scientist calls the chemical factors that determine traits ? . 12. mendel's second conclusion is the ? . 13. the principle of dominance states that some alleles are ? and others are ? . 14. when mendel allowed the f1 plants to reproduce by self-pollination the traits controlled by ? alleles reappeared in about ? of the f2 plants in each cross.

How can scientists test their ideas about the origin of the universe if they can't physically interact with or study?

Drag each tile to the correct box. match the given symbol or molecular formula to the term that best describes it. element -organic compound -inorganic elemental molecule -inorganic compound -answers given: so2, k, ci2, c6h6