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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 ...
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.
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 ...
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
1924 — Raymond Dart examines fossils of " Taung Child," found by quarrymen in South Africa, and names Australopithecus africanus. 1944 — The publication of Tempo and Mode in Evolution by George Gaylord Simpson integrates paleontology into the modern evolutionary synthesis. 1946 — Reginald Sprigg discovers fossils of the Ediacaran biota in ...
The term "Carboniferous" was first used as an adjective by Irish geologist Richard Kirwan in 1799 and later used in a heading entitled "Coal-measures or Carboniferous Strata" by John Farey Sr. in 1811. Four units were originally ascribed to the Carboniferous, in ascending order, the Old Red Sandstone, Carboniferous Limestone, Millstone Grit and ...
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 ...