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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 ...
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), was an evolutionary radiation of animal life throughout [ 1 ] the Ordovician period, 40 million years after the Cambrian explosion, [ 2 ] whereby the distinctive Cambrian fauna fizzled out to be replaced with a Paleozoic fauna rich in suspension feeder and pelagic animals.
Figure 1:In mammals, the quadrate and articular bones are small and part of the middle ear; the lower jaw consists only of dentary bone.. While living mammal species can be identified by the presence of milk-producing mammary glands in the females, other features are required when classifying fossils, because mammary glands and other soft-tissue features are not visible in fossils.
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 timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period. It includes brief explanations of the various taxonomic ranks in ...
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 ...
The Devonian (/ dəˈvoʊni.ən, dɛ -/ də-VOH-nee-ən, deh-) [ 9 ][ 10 ] is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic era during the Phanerozoic eon, spanning 60.3 million years from the end of the preceding Silurian period at 419.2 million years ago (Ma), to the beginning of the succeeding Carboniferous period at 358.9 Ma. [ 11 ]