Geology: Timeline

By Nathan18053
  • 540 BCE

    Cambrian explosion

    Cambrian explosion
    It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla.
  • 443 BCE

    Marine Life

    Marine Life
    Much of the landmass that would become western North America was under a shallow ocean for much of the Silurian Period. These shallow waters enabled sunlight to penetrate, and marine animals underwent rapid differentiation.
  • 440 BCE

    Silurian extinction

    Silurian extinction
    The animal Silurian went extinct.
  • 419 BCE

    Age of fishes

    Age of fishes
    The Devonian, part of the Paleozoic era, is otherwise known as the Age of Fishes, as it spawned a remarkable variety of fish.
  • 358 BCE

    Swamp Forest

    Swamp Forest
    The Carboniferous Period is famous for its vast swamp forests. Such swamps produced the coal from which the term Carboniferous
  • 300 BCE

    Mass Extinction

    Mass Extinction
    The Permian period, which ended in the largest mass extinction the Earth has ever known, began about 299 million years ago.
  • 251 BCE

    Triassic

    Triassic
    The start of the Triassic period (and the Mesozoic era) was a desolate time in Earth's history. Something—a bout of violent volcanic eruptions, climate change, or perhaps a fatal run-in with a comet or asteroid—had triggered the extinction of more than 90 percent of Earth's species.
  • 201 BCE

    Continents split

    Continents split
    During the Jurassic Period, the supercontinent Pangaea split apart. The northern half, known as Laurentia, was splitting into landmasses that would eventually form North America and Eurasia, opening basins for the central Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico
  • 145 BCE

    Most Extinctions

    Most Extinctions
    The most famous of all mass extinctions marks the end of the Cretaceous Period.
  • 65 BCE

    Tertiary

    Tertiary
    In terms of major events, the Tertiary period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, at the start of the Cenozoic era, and lasted to the beginning of the most recent Ice Age at the end of the Pliocene epoch
  • 2 BCE

    Emergence of men

    Emergence of men
    The Quaternary Period is most noted for its intervals of glacial and interglacial ages as well as the emergence of man. The Quaternary Period (aka the Great Ice Age)