The correct options are as follows:
1. D.
<span>A clade refers to a group of organisms that are made up of evolutionary descendants that originated from a common ancestor. A clade that will survive a series of catastrophic events must be one that is made up of distantly related and diverse species. This is because, those species will have different type of adaptability capacity and will be able to adapt in different ways to the catastrophic events. Due to the differences in their ability to adapt, some of the specie will survive the catastrophic events even if others are wipe out.
2. B.
The mass extinction of one specie usually creates space for another new specie to survive. The new specie that survive the old one may possess the ability to adapt to the event that wipe out the former set of living organisms and thus, the new specie will be able to occupy and reproduce in their new space. Mass extinction is said to occur when the whole population of living organism living in an ecosystem are wipe out as a result of unfavorable conditions.
3. B.
Convergent evolution refers to the independent evolution of similar features in species that arise from different lineages. The species involved usually evolve these traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments. Convergent evolution usually result in evolution of analogous structures, that is, structures that have similar forms or functions but which are not present in the last common ancestors of the species.
4. C.
In evolution, gradualism refers to theory that states that evolution occurs slowly and gradually, thus, large changes in evolution are actually product of small changes that occur over a long period of time. The theory of gradualism was originally proposed by James Hutton in 1795.
5. C.
Mass extinction refers to the wiping out of a a large number of species within a very short time. Mass extinction can occur as a result of severe unfavorable conditions that all the species in an ecosystem can not adapt to. An instance of this is a drastic decrease in global temperature after several massive volcanic eruptions.</span>
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A- embryo
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A- sperm cell
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<span>Wings have evolved several times independently. In flying fish, the wings are formed by the enlargement of the pectoral fins. Some fish leap out of the water and glide through the air, both to save energy and to escape predators. If they were already gliding, then any mutation that would result in an increase of the gliding surface would be advantageous to the fish that has it. These advantageous may allow these fish to out-compete the others.
Wings have also evolved in bats, pterosaurs, and birds. In these animals, the wings are formed by the forelimbs. In some lizards that have evolved gliding flight, however, the "wings" or gliding surfaces may be quite different. The lizard Draco, for example, has gliding surfaces formed by an extension of the ribs. A number of extinct reptiles have similar gliding surfaces. Frogs that glide have expanded webbing on their hands and feet. Gliding ("flying") squirrels and marsupial sugar gliders have flaps of skin that lie between the front and rear limbs. These gliding animals all have one thing in common: a gliding surface that is formed by enlarging some parts of the body.
In pterosaurs, the wing is formed by an elongated finger and a large skin membrane attached to this finger. In bats, the wing is formed by the entire hand, with skin membranes connecting the elongated fingers. In birds, flight feathers are attached to the entire forelimb, while the fingers have fused together. In all of these animals except birds, the wing is a solid structure. In birds, however, the wing is formed by a large number of individual feathers lying close to each other and each feather is in turn formed by filaments that interlock.
Biophysicists have determined that flight most likely evolved from the tree down. That means most active flyers evolved flight from an animal that was already gliding. Gliding was therefore probably an indispensable intermediate stage in the evolution of flight. Since gliding has evolved in so many different groups of animals, it follows that the ancestors of birds, bats, and pterosaurs were almost certainly gliders.
Unfortunately, the fossil records of the immediate gliding ancestors of birds, bats, and pterosaurs are all missing. The first known bat and bird fossils are recognizable as flyers. The same is true of pterosaurs. Therefore the origin of these flyers remain a mystery and a subject of often acrimonious debate. There are people who claim that dinosaurs evolved insulation, which then evolved into feathers, but the evidence for that is lacking. The so-called proto-feathers found on some dinosaurs are indistinguishable from the collagen fibers found in the skin of most vertebrates. Some of the supposedly feathered dinosaurs, such as Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx, are actually flightless birds. The same is probably true of Microraptor fossils, which are (as Alan Feduccia says) probably "avian non-dinosaurs."
Even though the immediate ancestor of birds remains a mystery, there is a fossil known as Longisquama insignis, which lived during the late Triassic. It has featherlike structures on its back. It was probably a glider of some sort. So, this animal may well be the distant ancestor of Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird.
In sum, flying almost certainly evolved from animals that were already gliding, or from the tree down, not from the ground up. The dinosaurian origin of birds requires that dinosaurs evolved feathers from insulation and flight to have evolved from the ground up. Both of these requirements are extremely unlikely to have occurred in evolutionary history, because dinosaurs are almost certainly ectothermic (or "cold-blooded") and therefore they never evolved insulation, and because feathers are too unnecessarily complex to have evolved as insulation. Flight from the ground up is also dangerous because large animals that attempt to fly from the ground may crash and seriously injure or even kill themselves. We all know how dangerous an airplane can be if it loses power and crashes. Small and light weight animals, OTOH, that were already gliding can survive if their attempt to fly fails. Finally, if flight evolved from gliding, then why do animals glide? The answer is that gliding is energetically much cheaper than to descend a tree, walk along the ground, and then climb up another tree. Besides, it is almost certainly much safer to glide from one tree to another than to be walking on the ground for many arboreal animals.
See link below for details of why dinosaurs are considered ectothermic according to the available scientific evidence.</span>Source(s):<span>http://discovermagazine.com/1996/dec/aco...</span>
