what is the modern day fossil of metacocera?
92408
Looks like a cephalopod.
496038
543 million  years ago (Evolutionary Analysis 2nd Ed, by Freeman & Herron).\n\n544 million years ago\nhttp://geology.er.usgs.gov/paleo/glossary.shtml#p\n\n570 million years ago\nhttp://www.palaeos.com/Geochronology/gcglossary.html\n\n600 million years ago\nhttp://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/Geologic-Time.html\n\n(Absolute dating is not exact. See the last link)
339351
This link I'll provide has a graphic of the Jurassic time period.
862177
.  Animals which have a simple evolutionary history are usually soft bodied, and soft bodies animal do not leave good fossils.  It is easy to find analogs for evolutionary steps toward certain animals, the whale for example,  but finding an clear-cut sequence of fossils is difficult.\n.  But, looking at analogs, consider the weasel, the otter, the seal, the manatee and the whale.  The difference between any two steps in this sequence is fairly small, but the difference from one end to the other seems quite large.\n.  There are enough fossils whose ages may be determined that, studied as a group, studied as a group, they demonstrate an increase in complexity of organisms over time and indicate familial relationships.  Bony headed fishes, known only from fossils, were the ancestors of fish like the coelacanth.  Fishes like the collegian were ancestral to both modern fishes and the fish which pulled themselves up from the water on strong, bony fins.\n.  The horse has some obvious ancestors, but the the fossil record of those ancestor becomes weaker as you go back in time.  The fossil record  between shrew like mammals and those creatures which had some horse like characteristics has big gaps in it..
634300
Yes, cockroaches are the only living thing which doesn't undergone any evolutionary changes till now.\nIt just adapt itself to any type of environment.
229254
Around 3.5 billion years ago
626288
http://ceratium.ietc.wwu.edu/IWS/Images/Biota/Animalia/Mollusca/Bivalvia/Psammobiidae/Nuttallia/obscurata\nit's on this page
297873
The era you are asking about is Jurassic (it was between the Cretaceous and Triassic period). As for the fastest dinosaur in this era, if what Paleontologists have found is correct, I believe it was Compsognathus.
304118
Birds are the direct descendents of dinosaurs.  Many scientists will say they *are* dinosaurs.  As such, they are alive, so dinosaurs are alive.\n\nWhile it remains possible that some dinosaurs proper have survived, it is extremely unlikely at this point.  There is no physical evidence for it.\n\nYour second question is difficult to answer.  Are there prehistoric creatures that have survived?  Sure!  Pretty much every species on earth today (even humans!) is older than history, that makes it prehistoric!  Defining prehistoric any other way would essentially make prehistoric mean "not surviving today", so the answer would be no.\n\nWhat you mean, of course, is creatures to have survived from truly ancient times, such as from the Mesozoic (age of dinosaurs) or older, but again, it's difficult to answer.  There probably aren't any actual species that old, but it's difficult to tell if something in the fossil record is actually the same species as something alive today.  Consider, lions and tigers look and act very different alive and are certainly two different species, but it is very difficult to tell their skeletons apart.\n\nA lot of so-called "living fossils" really aren't.  For instance, we have no fossils of the Coelacanth.  It's closest relatives in the fossil record are in another family (as different as cats and dogs).  Cockroaches are often said to have been unchanged for millions of years, but it's not the case as the fossil record records them evolving continuously.  The first fossil cockroaches had three pairs of wings!\n\nBut some things have survived nearly unchanged for millions of years.  Six-gill and Port Jackson sharks are very much like they were in the age of dinosaurs.  The Tuatara is surprisingly like it's Mesozoic relatives.\n\nBut the king of living fossils is the Lingula brachiopod.  It looks like a clam and lives by filter feeding, but don't let it's calm appearance fool you.  These little guys are survivors.  They've been living in Earth's oceans almost unchanged for 550 million years!  That's almost as long as we have animal fossils at all!  Dinosaurs are hardly teenagers by comparison!\n\nAddenda:  The Komodo Dragon is NOT believed to be a dinosaur, at least not by scientists.  It is just a large monitor lizard.  Dinosaurs are not lizards, being classed among the Archosaurs with the crocodiles, pterosaurs and birds.
330500
since the Jurassic Era
98203
>>>>>They have never found any.\n\nThere are many transitional fossils.\n\n\nThe only way that the claim of their absence may be remotely justified, aside from ignoring the evidence completely, is to redefine "transitional" as referring to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and a direct descendant of another. However, direct lineages are not required; they could not be verified even if found. What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.\n\nTransitional fossils may coexist with gaps. We do not expect to find finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years. Nevertheless, we do find several fine gradations of fossils between species and genera, and we find many other sequences between higher taxa that are still very well filled out.\n\nThe following are fossil transitions between species and genera:\n\n   1. Human ancestry. There are many fossils of human ancestors, and the differences between species are so gradual that it is not always clear where to draw the lines between them.\n\n   2. The horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) appear in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence. Other head and neck features also evolved. These features are adaptations for head-on ramming analogous to sheep behavior (Stanley 1974).\n\n   3. A gradual transitional fossil sequence connects the foraminifera Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (Pearson et al. 1997). O. universa, the later fossil, features a spherical test surrounding a "Globigerinoides-like" shell, showing that a feature was added, not lost. The evidence is seen in all major tropical ocean basins. Several intermediate morphospecies connect the two species, as may be seen in the figure included in Lindsay (1997).\n\n   4. The fossil record shows transitions between species of Phacops (a trilobite; Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil; Eldredge 1972; 1974; Strapple 1978).\n\n   5. Planktonic forminifera (Malmgren et al. 1984). This is an example of punctuated gradualism. A ten-million-year foraminifera fossil record shows long periods of stasis and other periods of relatively rapid but still gradual morphologic change.\n\n   6. Fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia are very common (they are mined as diatomaceous earth), and they show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a record of a speciation event (Miller 1999, 44-45).\n\n   7. Lake Turkana mollusc species (Lewin 1981).\n\n   8. Cenozoic marine ostracodes (Cronin 1985).\n\n   9. The Eocene primate genus Cantius (Gingerich 1976, 1980, 1983).\n\n  10. Scallops of the genus Chesapecten show gradual change in one "ear" of their hinge over about 13 million years. The ribs also change (Pojeta and Springer 2001; Ward and Blackwelder 1975).\n\n  11. Gryphaea (coiled oysters) become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic (Hallam 1968).
93944
The oldest fossil evidence for life on Earth is found in 3.5 billion year old rocks in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Along with rocks of similar age in South Africa these are the oldest well preserved sedimentary rocks known. The evidence for fossil life takes the form of: \n\nstructures called stromatolites which are believed to be the fossilized remains of laminated structures built by colonies of micro-organisms. Modern examples of such colonies are found in Shark Bay in Western Australia \nmicrofossils of individual micro-organisms. \ncarbon isotope ratios indicative of biological activity. \nSome recent results include the discovery of 3.45 billion year old stromatolites by scientists of the Geological Survey of Western Australia, and the reporting of microfossils from a deep sea hot spring deposit of age 3.2 billion years by Birger Rasmussen of the University of Western Australia.\n\nWhile controversy surrounds many of the reports of fossils of this age, it is generally accepted that there is sufficient evidence to be reasonably sure that life was well established on earth at about 3.5byr ago. Older rocks at 3.8byr age in Greenland are too greatly deformed to preserve fossils but have been claimed to show evidence for life in their carbon isotope ratios.\n+\nFUNGI and algae first teamed up to form lichen 600 million years ago, according to newly discovered fossils from China. This makes them slightly older than the first fossils of complex soft-bodied animals, and far older than land plants.\n\nLichens are the product of a symbiotic relationship between algae, which produce food, and fungi, which provide moisture, nutrients and a protective framework. The new fossils come from south China, and were laid down in shallow seawater (Science, vol 308, p 1017).
348304
Paleoanthropology.  Carbon dating and stuff like that.
86928
Fossil bones and shells have turned into rocks.  That's why they're heavy.
1160643
maybe this can help\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossils
100140
Dinosaurs died 100,000,000 years ago. \nThey're gone! Get over it.
768483
Yes. It does seem like we have all gone our separate ways since the Cambrian. Also, is it just me or is it impossible to find a good restaurant that serves fresh trilobites these days?\n\nCampaign to reunite Gondwanaland now!