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The Cenozoic (/ ˌ s iː n ə ˈ z oʊ. ɪ k, ˌ s ɛ n-/ SEE-nə-ZOH-ik, SEN-ə-; [1] [2] lit. ' new life ') is Earth's current geological era, representing the last 66 million years of Earth's history. It is characterized by the dominance of insects, mammals, birds and angiosperms (flowering plants).
It consists of three eras: The Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, [105] and is the time when multi-cellular life greatly diversified into almost all the organisms known today. [147] The Paleozoic ("old life") era was the first and longest era of the Phanerozoic eon, lasting from 538.8 to 251.9 Ma. [105]
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Between 640 and 720 million years ago, the Earth was covered in ice, snagging it the modern nickname “Snowball Earth.” Recently, researchers found a rock formation that shows the transition ...
It lasted all through the time of the non-avian dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era, and ended 33.9 million years ago in the middle of the Cenozoic Era (the current Era). This greenhouse period lasted 226.1 million years. The hottest part of the last greenhouse earth was the Late Paleocene - Early Eocene.
The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth's history, a time span of about 4.54 ± 0.05 Ga (4.54 billion years). [3] It chronologically organises strata, and subsequently time, by observing fundamental changes in stratigraphy that correspond to major geological or ...
There have been five or six major ice ages in the history of Earth over the past 3 billion years. The Late Cenozoic Ice Age began 34 million years ago, its latest phase being the Quaternary glaciation , in progress since 2.58 million years ago.
The Eocene (IPA: / ˈ iː ə s iː n, ˈ iː oʊ-/ EE-ə-seen, EE-oh-[5] [6]) is a geological epoch that lasted from about 56 to 33.9 million years ago (Ma). It is the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era.