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Cambrian Period (570-510 million years ago). An explosion of life populated the seas, but land areas remained barren. Animal life was wholly invertebrate, and the most common animals were arthropods called trilobites (now extinct), with species numbering in the thousands. Multiple collisions between the Earth's crustal plates gave rise to the first supercontinent, known as Gondwanaland.
Silurian Period
(439-408.5 million years ago) Life ventured on to land in the form of simple plants called psilophytes, with a vascular system for circulating water, and scorpion-like animals akin to now extinct marine arthropods called eurypterids. Trilobites decreased in number and variety, but the seas teemed with reef corals, cephalopods, and jawed fishes.
Permian Period
(290-245 million years ago).
The Earth's land areas became welded into a single land mass that geologists call Pangaea, and in the North American region the Appalachians were formed. Cycad-like plants and true conifers appeared in the northern hemisphere, replacing the coal forests. Environmental changes resulting from the redistribution of land and sea triggered the greatest mass extinction of all time. Trilobites and many fishes and corals died out as the Palaeozoic era came to an end.
Jurassic Period (208-145.6 million years ago). As Gondwanaland rifted apart, the North Atlantic Ocean widened and the South Atlantic was born. Giant dinosaurs ruled on land, while marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs increased in number. Primitive birds appeared, and modern reef-building corals grew in coastal shallows. Crab-like and lobster-like animals evolved among the arthropods.
Tertiary Period (65-1.64 million years ago). In the Tertiary, North America's land link to Europe was broken, but its ties to South America were forged towards the end of the period. During Cenozoic times, life forms both on land and in the sea became more like those of today. Grasses became more prominent, leading to marked changes in the dentition of plant-eating animals. With most of the dominant reptile forms having vanished at the end of the Cretaceous, the Cenozoic became the age of mammals. Thus, in the Eocene epoch, new mammal groups developed such as small, horse-like animals; rhinoceroses; tapirs; ruminants; whales; and the ancestors of elephants. Members of the cat and dog families appeared in the Oligocene epoch, as did species of monkeys. In Miocene times, marsupials were numerous, and anthropoid (humanlike) apes first appeared. Placental mammals reached their zenith, in numbers and variety of species, in the Pliocene, extending into the Quaternary period
Quaternary Period (1.64 million years ago to present). Intermittent continental ice sheets covered much of the northern hemisphere. Fossil remains show that many primitive prehuman types existed in south-central Africa, China, and Java by Lower and middle Pleistocene times; but modern humans (Homo sapiens) did not appear until the later Pleistocene. Late in the period, humans crossed over into the New World by means of the Bering land bridge. The ice sheets finally retreated, and the modern age began.
Stratigraphic column
principle of uniformitarianism
states that the geologic processes observed in operation that modify the Earth's crust at present have worked in much the same way over geologic time. A fundamental principle of geology advanced by the 18th century Scottish physician and geologist James Hutton, is that "the present is the key to the past." In Hutton's words: "the past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now."
principle of superposition
states that a sedimentary rock layer in a tectonically undisturbed sequence is younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it. Logically a younger layer cannot slip beneath a layer previously deposited. This principle allows sedimentary layers to be viewed as a form of vertical time line, a partial or complete record of the time elapsed from deposition of the lowest layer to deposition of the highest bed.
The principle becomes quite complex, however, given the uncertainties of fossilization, the localization of fossil types due to lateral changes in habitat (facies change in sedimentary strata), and that not all fossils may be found globally at the same time.