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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 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 first fully terrestrial vertebrates were reptilian amniotes — their eggs had internal membranes that allowed the developing embryo to breathe but kept water in. This allowed amniotes to lay eggs on dry land, while amphibians generally need to lay their eggs in water (a few amphibians, such as the common Suriname toad, have evolved other ways of getting around this limitation).
The Paleozoic is a time in Earth's history when active complex life forms evolved, took their first foothold on dry land, and when the forerunners of all multicellular life on Earth began to diversify. There are six periods in the Paleozoic era: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian.
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.
The Cambrian explosion (also known as Cambrian radiation [1] or Cambrian diversification) is an interval of time approximately in the Cambrian period of the early Paleozoic when a sudden radiation of complex life occurred, and practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record.
Rising steadily from 4 m to 90 m [ 4 ] The Cambrian (/ ˈkæmbri.ən, ˈkeɪm -/ KAM-bree-ən, KAYM-) is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and the Phanerozoic Eon. [ 5 ] The Cambrian lasted 53.4 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran period 538.8 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Ordovician Period 485 ...