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The Oligocene is preceded by the Eocene Epoch and is followed by the Miocene Epoch. The Oligocene is the third and final epoch of the Paleogene Period. The Oligocene is often considered an important time of transition, a link between the archaic world of the tropical Eocene and the more modern ecosystems of the Miocene. [9]
The Eocene–Oligocene extinction event, also called the Eocene-Oligocene transition (EOT) or Grande Coupure (French for "great cut"), is the transition between the end of the Eocene and the beginning of the Oligocene, an extinction event and faunal turnover occurring between 33.9 and 33.4 million years ago. [1]
The term "Eocene" is derived from Ancient Greek Ἠώς (Ēṓs) meaning "Dawn", and καινός kainos meaning "new" or "recent", as the epoch saw the dawn of recent, or modern, life. Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (ignoring the Quaternary) divided the Tertiary Epoch into the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and New Pliocene Periods in 1833.
A brief marine incursion marks the early Oligocene in Europe. There appears to have been a land bridge in the early Oligocene between North America and Europe since the faunas of the two regions are very similar. During the Oligocene, South America was finally detached from Antarctica and drifted north toward North America.
The surviving tropical population of primates, which is seen most completely in the upper Eocene and lowermost Oligocene fossil beds of the Faiyum depression southwest of Cairo, gave rise to all living species—lemurs of Madagascar, lorises of Southeast Asia, galagos or "bush babies" of Africa, and the anthropoids: platyrrhine or New World ...
[15] [16] The end of the Eocene was marked by the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event, [17] [18] [19] the European face of which is known as the Grande Coupure. [20] [21] The Oligocene Epoch spans from 33.9 million to 23.03 million years ago. The Oligocene featured the expansion of grasslands which had led to many new species to evolve ...
Creodonta ("meat teeth") is a former order of extinct carnivorous placental mammals that lived from the early Paleocene to the late Miocene epochs in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The definition of standardised international units of geological time is the ... Names of systems are diverse in origin, ... Oligocene 10.86 ...