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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 ...
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 ...
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.
End Ordovician: 440 million years ago, 86% of all species lost, including graptolites. Late Devonian: 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost, including most trilobites. End Permian, The Great Dying: 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost, including tabulate corals, and most trees and synapsids.
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 Ediacaran (/ ˌiːdiˈækərən /; formerly Vendian) biota is a taxonomic period classification that consists of all life forms that were present on Earth during the Ediacaran Period (c.635–538.8 Mya). These were enigmatic tubular and frond-shaped, mostly sessile, organisms. [ 1 ][ 2 ] Trace fossils of these organisms have been found ...
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 ...