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The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...
e. Paleontology (/ ˌpeɪliɒnˈtɒlədʒi, ˌpæli -, - ən -/ PAY-lee-on-TOL-ə-jee, PAL-ee-, -ən-), also spelled palaeontology[ a ] or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). [citation needed] It includes the study of fossils to classify ...
1859 — Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. 1861 — The first Archaeopteryx, skeleton is found in Bavaria, Germany, and recognized as a transitional form between reptiles and birds. 1869 — Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature. 1871 — Othniel Charles Marsh discovers the first American pterosaur fossils.
The timeline of the evolutionary history of liferepresents the current scientific theoryoutlining the major events during the development of lifeon planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence, mainly fossils. In biology, evolutionis any change across successive generations in the heritable ...
Palaeozoology, also spelled as Paleozoology (Greek: παλαιόν, palaeon "old" and ζῷον, zoon "animal"), is the branch of paleontology, paleobiology, or zoology dealing with the recovery and identification of multicellular animal remains from geological (or even archeological) contexts, and the use of these fossils in the reconstruction of prehistoric environments and ancient ecosystems.
1991 [1] The Paleoproterozoic Era[4] (also spelled Palaeoproterozoic) is the first of the three sub-divisions (eras) of the Proterozoic eon, and also the longest era of the Earth's geological history, spanning from 2,500 to 1,600 million years ago (2.5–1.6 Ga).
A noteworthy feature of Paleozoic life is the sudden appearance of nearly all of the invertebrate animal phyla in great abundance at the beginning of the Cambrian. The first vertebrates appeared in the form of primitive fish, which greatly diversified in the Silurian and Devonian Periods. The first animals to venture onto dry land were the ...
Insects are thought to have evolved from a group of crustaceans. [ 2 ] The first insects were landbound, but about 400 million years ago in the Devonian period one lineage of insects evolved flight, the first animals to do so. [ 1 ] The oldest insect fossil has been proposed to be Rhyniognatha hirsti, estimated to be 400 million years old, but ...