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Importance of fossils in deciding evolutionary relationship is
A. Fossils are just for visual beauty.
B. Fossils provide missing links between two different groups and indicate their evolutionary relationship.
C. All fossils are useless.
D. None of these.

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Last updated date: 15th Sep 2024
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Answer
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Hint: Fossils are the conserved remnants or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the past. Fossils are significant evidence for development because they demonstrate that life on earth was once different from life found on earth today.

Complete Answer:
Fossils are the preserved remnants or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the past. Fossils' age ranges from 10,000 to 3.48 billion years old. The inspection that certain fossils were connected with certain rock strata led 19th century geologists to identify a geological timescale. Like existing organisms, fossils differ in size from microscopic, like single-celled bacteria, to gigantic, like dinosaurs and trees.

Fossils may also consist of the marks left following by the organism while it was alive, such as footprints or feces. These types of fossils are called trace fossils, or ichnofossils, as divergent to body fossils. Fossils supply solid facts that organisms from the past are not the same as those established today.

Fossils explain a series of evolution. Fossils, along with the relative makeup of contemporary organisms, comprise the morphological, or anatomical, record. By comparing the anatomies of both current and destroyed species, paleontologists can gather the lineages of those species. This approach is most thriving for organisms that had rigid body parts such as shells, bones or teeth.

The method of a once living organism suitable for a fossil is called fossilization. Fossilization is an extremely rare process, and of all the organisms that have lived on Earth, only a minute proportion of them ever become fossils.

So we can conclude that the correct answer for this question is option B Fossils provide missing links between two different groups and indicate their evolutionary relationship.

Note: Usually only a portion of an organism is preserved as a fossil, such as body fossils of bones and exoskeletons , trace fossils like feces and footprints, and chemofossils (biochemical signals). Paleontologists can establish the age of fossils using methods like radiometric dating and classify them to determine the evolutionary relationships among organisms.