GEOLOGIC TIME

Go to http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/help/timeform.html to fill in the following table:

ERA | PERIOD | INDEX FOSSILS USED TO IDENTIFY ROCKS OF THIS AGE (DESCRIBE WHAT THESE FOSSILS ARE AS WELL) | ABSOLUTE AGE RANGE (MYA) | MAJOR GEOLOGIC EVENTS | CENOZOIC | Quaternary | Evidence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and early types of plants.Pleistocene conifers, mosses, flowering plants, insects, mollusks, birds, mammals (sloths, bison, sabre-toothed cats, mammoths, early human hunters). Diatoms, foraminifera, and plant pollen. | 1.8 MYA to today. | Yet the Holocene has witnessed all of humanity's recorded history and the rise and fall of all its civilizations. It was during the Pleistocene that the most recent episodes of global cooling, or ice ages, took place. Temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods. The Pleistocene also saw the evolution and expansion of our own species, Homo sapiens. | | Tertiary | Grazing mammals, such as members of the perissodactyl and artiodactyls diversified in the Miocene and Pliocene.Long legged grazers.Chalicotherium , perissodactyls. artiodactylsHyaenodon horridus, elephants, horses, various grassesUngulates such as Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla, Vivveravus | 65 to 1.8 MYA. | The cooling and drying of the global environment may have contributed to the enormous spread of grasslands in this time. The change in vegetation undoubtedly was a major factor in the rise of long-legged grazers who came to live in these areas. The Panamanian land-bridge between North and South America appeared during the Pliocene, allowing migrations of plants and animals. | MESOZOIC | Cretaceous | Some ceratopsian and pachycepalosaurid dinosaurs, non-avian dinosaurs, insects, mammals, ammonites, first flowering plants | 144 to 65 mya | "Age of Dinosaurs". The breakup of the world-continent Pangaea. The end of the Cretaceous brought the end of many previously successful and diverse groups of organisms. | | Jurassic | Dinosaurs, ferns, cyads, bennettitalaens, carnivores, herbivores, squid, fish, coiled ammonites, ichthyosaurs and long-necked plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, first birds. | 206 to 144 mya | Named for the Jura Mountains on the border between France and Switzerland, the Jurassic is still important to us today, both because of its wealth of fossils and because of its economic importance -- the oilfields of the North Sea, for instance, are Jurassic in age. | | Triassic | Lycophytes, glossopterids, and dicynodonts, modern conifers, cycadeoids, and the dinosaurs. | 248 to 206 mya | It was at this time that the world-continent of Pangaea existed, altering global climate and ocean circulation. The Triassic also follows the largest extinction event in the history of life, and so is a time when the survivors of that event spread and recolonized. | PALEOZOIC | Permian | Sea life, diapsids and synapsids, marine invertebrates, gymnosperms, plants with their offspring enclosed within seeds. Modern conifers | 290 to 248 mya | By the beginning of the Permian, the motion of the Earth's crustal plates had brought much of the total land together, fused in a supercontinent known as Pangea. | | Carboniferous | amniote egg, cole, tetrapods, lycopods, large insects,crinoids and lime-encrusted green algae. | 354 to 290 mya | The term "Carboniferous" reference to the rich deposits of coal that occurs there. One of the greatest evolutionary innovations of the Carboniferous. Plant material did not decay when the seas covered them and pressure and heat eventually built up over the millions of years to transform the plant material To coal. | | Devonian | Zosterophyllophytes and Trimerophytes, ferns, horsetails and seed plants, Archaeopteris and the first trees | 417 to 354 mya | Also during the Devonian, two major animal groups colonized the land. Three major continental masses: North America and Europe sat together near the equator, much of their current land underneath seas. To the north lay a portion of modern Siberia. A composite continent of South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia dominated the southern hemisphere. | | Silurian | Fishes, jawless fish, freshwater fish, spiders and centipedes, vascular plants. | 443 to 417 mya | The Silurian witnessed a relative stabilization of the earth's general climate, ending the previous pattern of erratic climatic fluctuations. One result of these changes was the melting of large glacial formations. | | Ordovician | diverse marine invertebrates, including graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, and the conodonts, plus red and green algae, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals, crinoids, and gastropods, primitive land plants. | 490 to 443 mya | the area north of the tropics was almost entirely ocean, and most of the world's land was collected into the southern super-continent Gondwana. The Gondwana finally settled on the South Pole during the Late Ordovician. | | Cambrian | trilobites and brachiopods, first deposits of bibilical flood, bacteria, algae, | 543 to 490 mya | The Cambrian Period marks an important point in the history of life on earth; it is the time when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. This event is sometimes called the "Cambrian Explosion", | | Tommotian | Rock exposures in Siberia, the Tommotian saw the first major radiation of the animals, or metazoans, including the first appearance of a great many mineralized taxa such as brachiopods, trilobites, archaeocyathids, molluscs, echinoderms, and more problematic forms. Soft-bodied members of many other phyla, archaeocyathid reefs | 530 to 527 mya | World climates were mild; there was no glaciation. Most of North America lay in warm southern tropical and temperate latitudes, which supported the growth of extensive shallow-water archaeocyathid reefs all through the Lower Cambrian. Siberia, which also supported abundant reefs, was a separate continent due east of North America. Baltica -- what is now Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and European Russia -- lay to the south. |