GEOLOGIC TIMELINE

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Classification of Living Things

Szerző: Steven Kiss

Organigram

Szerző: Gia Macpherson

bats

Szerző: cindy smith

clasification of animals

Szerző: Stephanie Garrido

Comparison of Vascular and Non-Vacular Plants

The tabulate colonial corals are the first corals to appear in the fossil record (shown above is the Foerstiphyllum vacua)

Super-continent Rodinia

Holocene (Today)

Industrial Revolution

Introduced concepts of factories, AI, machine learning, robotics, that could possibly reduce the need for much human labour in the near future

Led to a new age of innovation and technology

Global Warming

Predicted that 20% of all plant and animal species on Earth will be extinct in the next 25 years

Habitat destruction, pollution, etc. causing mass extinction of plant and animal species

Human activity influencing the surrounding environment

Human Civilization

The Holocene witnessed all of humanity’s recorded history

Pleistocene

Mass extinction of large mammals and many birds

Likely caused by the end of the last ice age

Evolution of Homo Sapiens

Little Ice Age

much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during warmer interglacial periods

mountain glaciers formed on all continents

Pliocene

Drying of the Mediterranean Sea

remained plains and grasslands for the next several million years

Formation of the Himalayan Mountains

tectonic plates of India and Asia collided

Enormous spread of grasslands and savannas

change in vegetation led to the rise of grazers in these areas

longer legs allowed for them to walk long distances to new feeding grounds

grazers got larger and developed larger teeth suitable for a diet of grass

possibly caused by the cooling and drying of global environments

First hominids

Miocene

Rise of the Andes Mountains

This led to the formation of a rain shadow effect in the southeastern part of the continent

This event was caused by the movements in plate tectonics in the vicinity of South America

Appearance of More Mammals

i.e. Horses, dogs, bears

Formation of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountain Ranges

Increase of droughts and decrease in rainfall promoted drier climates

Caused a non-seasonal and drier mid-continent climate

Two new major ecosystems

Grasslands

Led to open habitat herbivores and carnivores

The expansion of grasslands correlated to a drying of continental interiors as the global warming first warmed, then cooled

Kelp forests

Led to the appearance of sea otters and other critters unique to this environment

Oligocene

The Grand Coupure

The extinction of any Eocene genera and species

about 20 first appearances

around 17 generic extinctions

event involved the immigration from areas to the east of many taxa, artiodactyls, and perissodactyls

Appearance of many grasses

intimately linked to the expansion of grazing animals

Appearance of new mammals

i.e. pigs, deer, cats, rhinos, tapirs

Eocene

Primitive whales appear

The Circum-Antarctic Current

This changed oceanic circulation patterns and global heat transport, resulting in a global cooling event

Caused by the separation of Antartica and Australia creating a deep water passage between those two continents

Eohippus - First Known Horse

Paleocene

First primitive primates

First large mammals

Paleocene mammals show the beginning of specializations that characterize their later descendants

At the start of the Paleocene Epoch, the world was practically without larger terrestrial animals, however, by the end, they had occupied a large part of the vacant ecological niches.

Cenozoic Era (~65 MYA - Today)

Cretaceous

The Uplift of the Rocky Mountains

Streams eroded away at the sedimentary rock

Giant blocks of ancient crystalline rock, overlain by younger sedimentary broke and were thrust upward

Continents take on a Modern-Day Look

The K-T Extinction of Dinosaurs

Most likely caused by asteroid impact or volcanism

First Flowering Plants

Quickly dominated plant life on land and remain so today

i.e. Angiosperms (evolved from a specialized group of seed ferns)

Jurassic

Appearance of dinosaur-like birds

Pterosaurs were the largest vertebrates ever known to fly

Archaepteryx were the first, primitive, dinosaur-like birds

Minor mass extinction at the end of the early Jurassic period

Possibly triggered by the release of huge methane deposits from within the Earth

more than 80% of marine bivalve species (i.e. clams) and other shallow-water specieis died out

More dinosaur species appear

The Dipolodocus and Apatosaurus diversified

i.e. The giant Sauropod

Earthworms

Triassic

In the seas, icthyosaurs (marine reptiles) appeared

Minor extinction

It is not certain what caused this extinction, possibly global cooling or an asteroid impact

This allowed for dinosaurs to expand into many niches

35% of all animal families died out

First Mammals and Crocodyliformes

Some scientists believe that mammals evolved from a group of extinct mammal-like reptiles, Theriodontia

Start of the Age of Dinosaurs

After the largest extinction event in history (Permian Extinction), the survivors of that event spread and recolonized

Mesozoic Era (~248 - 65 MYA)

Permian

Pangea

Rest of the surface area of the Earth was occupied by a single ocean (Panthalassa) and a smaller sea known as Tethys

Motion of the Earth’s crustal plates fused much of the total land into Pangea

Largest mass extinction

Possibly caused by glaciation or volcanism

Extinction of:

Many trees

50% of all animal families

Trilobites

95% of all marine species

The Age of Amphibians

Amphibians and reptiles dominated

Carboniferous

Formation of the Ural

A collision of Siberia and eastern Europe

Formation of the Appalachian Mountain Belt

Collision of Laurrussia (present-day Europe and North America) into Godwanland (present-day Africa and South America)

Mild Temperatures

Increase in the number of tree ferns

Evidenced by the decrease in lycopods and large insects

Amniote Egg

This allowed the ancestors of birds, mammals, and reptiles to reproduce on land by preventing the dessication of the embryo inside

Winged Insects

i.e. appearance of mayflies and cockroaches

Devonian

Mass Extinction

Most likely due to glaciation or meteorite impact

Wiped out 30% of all animal families

First Insects

i.e. Springtails

First Shark, Bony Fish, and Ammonoids

First Amphibians

Ferns

Silurian

Stabilization of the Earth’s general climate

Contributed to a substantial rise in the levels of major seas

This ended the previous pattern of erratic climatic fluctuations

Led to the melting of large glacial formations

First Vascular Plants

These plants have water-conducting tissue compared with non-vascular plants

First Jawed Fish

Ordovician

Geographical Changes

North America under shallow seas

Global cooling, glaciation, and lots of volcanism

High sea levels at first

First Coral Reefs

First Land Plants

Gondwana

Most of the world’s land collected into this southern super-continent

The area north of the tropics almost entirely ocean

Cambrian

Extinction of trilobites nautiloids

Most likely due to glaciation

50% of all animal families went extinct

Rodinia

Position of the continents was very different from current day (e.g. Califronia on the equator or Venezuela near the South Pole)

Super-continent Rodinia begins to break into smaller continents (with no correspondence to modern-day land masses)

Rocks of Cambrian

Distributed in the Great Basin of the western U.S, parts of Wales, Scandinavia, and the Baltic region, Siberia and China, among other places

Cambrian Explosion

All existent phyla develop

When most of the major animal groups started to appear in the fossil record, a time of rapid expansion of diverse forms of life on Earth

Paleozoic Era (~540 - 330 MYA)