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During the Cenozoic, mammals proliferated from a few small, simple, generalised forms into a diverse collection of terrestrial, marine, and flying animals, giving this period its other name, the Age of Mammals. The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects, and the age of birds. [40]
A Cenozoic chronology based on mammal taxa has been defined on all the continents except Antarctica. [4]: 939 Because the continents have been separated through most of the Cenozoic, each continent has its own system. [5] Most of the units are based on assemblage zones, layers of strata that contain three or more distinctive fossils.
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.
Archaeocetes retained aspects of their mesonychian ancestry (such as the triangular teeth) which modern artiodactyls, and modern whales, have lost. The earliest ancestors of all hoofed mammals were probably at least partly carnivorous or scavengers, and today's artiodactyls and perissodactyls became herbivores later in their evolution.
The examples described below represent different modes of speciation and provide strong evidence for common descent. Not all speciation research directly observes divergence from "start-to-finish". This is by virtue of research delimitation and definition ambiguity, and occasionally leads research towards historical reconstructions.
Arboreal primates had access to a variety of tree-borne foods, such as fruits, flowers, leaves, gums, and insects. It is believed that a shift towards an insect-rich diet occurred during the early Cenozoic era, coinciding with a global increase in insect populations.
The Quaternary (/ k w ə ˈ t ɜːr n ə r i, ˈ k w ɒ t ər n ɛr i / kwə-TUR-nə-ree, KWOT-ər-nerr-ee) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), as well as the current and most recent of the twelve periods of the Phanerozoic eon. [3]
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 ...