1. One cause of mass extinctions is meteorite or comet impacts.

What
might be some additional causes of mass extinctions?

Other possible causes of mass extinction are volcanic eruptions, changes

in climatic conditions and changes in sea level.

2. Why did early geologic time scales not include the number of years ago
that events happened?
It is because the early geologic time scale only showed the order of
events, and it did not show the actual years that events happen. Geologic time
are not divided into equal numbers of years. Instead, they are divided into blocks
of time when the fossil record shows that there were similar organisms on Earth.

3. Animals that are readily classified into extant phyla, such as Mollusca
and Arthropoda, appeared in the Cambrian without transitional forms
that show how their distinctive body plans evolved. This “explosion” in
fossil diversity had to come from somewhere. What are some of the
best hypotheses explaining why animal fossils are not found before the
Cambrian, despite molecular evidence suggesting divergence in the
much more distant past than that?

Even organisms that hadn't evolved hard parts, and thus didn't leave
fossils of their bodies, left fossils of the trails they made as they moved through
the Precambrian mud. Life was flourishing long before the Cambrian "explosion".