WHAT IS THE STORY OF THE FOSSILS? 227 



SELF-TESTING EXERCISE 



Select from the following list the words which best fill the blank spaces 

 in the sentences below and arrange the words in proper numerical order. 

 A word may be used more than once. 



2,000,000,000 oldest not history 



sediments youngest inhabit very 



500,000 does animals rock 



sand do marble mud 



dead often plants fossil 



living sandstone plant water 



lived never petrified earth 



Sedimentary rocks originated from (1) deposited in (2) 



After (3) things came to (4) the earth, it (5) hap- 

 pened that plants or (6) would be buried in the (7) 



After the (8) hardened into (9) it might preserve evidence 



of the (10) or animal. Any evidence of a living thing pre- 

 served in this way in (11) is called a (12) It is believed 



the earth is at least (13) years old, but living things have 



not always (14) here. Igneous rocks which are the type of 



the (15) rocks on the earth (16) (17) contain fossils. 



Sedimentary rocks (18) (19) contain fossils from which we 



read the (20) of life on the earth. 



STORY TEST 



HERBERT HAS HAD FINE OPPORTUNITIES FOR FIELD OBSERVATION 

 Read carefully and critically. List all the errors and suggest corrections. 



Last summer I was lucky enough to be invited on an auto camp- 

 ing trip with my chum. His father, a science teacher, was one of 

 the party. In the Connecticut valley in Massachusetts we saw 

 great 3-toe footprints in beds of sandstone. There were no bones 

 of the animal but it was a fossil just the same. In Barre, Vermont, 

 we visited the world-famous granite quarries. We saw toads 

 there that the men said jumped out of hollow places when they 

 split blocks of granite out of the ledges. The toads must have 

 been living fossils. In northern New York we saw smoothed rocks 

 with scratches and grooves all running in the same direction. 

 These scratches were made by the glacier thousands of years ago, 

 and since they are records of what happened long ago, they are 

 fossils. In western Pennsylvania we broke off slabs of limestone 

 and found many excellent fossil shells. In a coal deposit we found 

 the imprint of a tree showing clearly the markings on the bark. 



