The Paleozoic Era

543 to 248 Million Years Age

The Paleozoic Era (meaning "ancient life") is the earliest of three geologic eras of the
Phanerozoic Eon. The Paleozoic spanned from roughly 542 to 251 million years ago (ICS,
2004), and is subdivided into six geologic periods; from oldest to youngest they are: the
Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian. Fish populations
exploded in the Devonian. During the late Paleozoic, great forests of primitive plants thrived on
land forming the great coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. By the end of the era,
the first large, sophisticated reptiles and the first modern plants (conifers) had developed.

The Paleozoic Era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-
Triassic Extinction Event. The effects of this catastrophe were so devastating that it took life on
land 30 million years to recover. Recovery of life in the sea may have been much faster.

The Paleozoic is bracketed by two of the most important events in the history of animal life. At
its beginning, multicelled animals underwent a dramatic "explosion" in diversity, and almost all
living animal phyla appeared within a few millions of years. At the other end of the Paleozoic,
the largest mass extinction in history wiped out approximately 90% of all marine animal species.
The causes of both these events are still not fully understood and the subject of much research
and controversy. Roughly halfway in between, animals, fungi, and plants alike colonized the
land, the insects took to the air, and the limestone shown in this picture was deposited near
Burlington, Missouri.

Many Paleozoic rocks are economically important. For example, much of the limestone
quarried for building and industrial purposes, as well as the coal deposits of western Europe
and the eastern United States, were formed during the Paleozoic.

The chart at left shows the major subdivisions of the

Paleozoic Era. This image is mapped to take you to
our exhibits on each of these subdivisions.

The Paleozoic Era occurs between the Proterozoic

and the Mesozoic.
 The Ordovician
490 to 443 Million Years Ago

The Ordovician period began approximately 490 million years ago, with the end of the
Cambrian, and ended around 443 million years ago, with the beginning of the Silurian. At this
time, 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. Throughout the Ordovician, Gondwana
shifted towards the South Pole and much of it was submerged underwater.

The Ordovician is best known for the presence of its diverse marine invertebrates, including
graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, and the conodonts (early vertebrates). A typical marine
community consisted of these animals, plus red and green algae, primitive fish, cephalopods,
corals, crinoids, and gastropods. More recently, there has been found evidence of tetrahedral
spores that are similar to those of primitive land plants, suggesting that plants invaded the land
at this time.

Subdivisions of the
Ordovician:

The chart at left shows the major subdivisions of the

Ordovician Period. This chart is mapped, to allow you
to travel back to the Cambrian or forward to the
Silurian.

The Ordovician Period is part of the Paleozoic Era

The Ordovician Period is the second period of the Paleozoic Era.  This important period saw the
origin and rapid evolution of many new types of invertebrate animals which replaced their
Cambrian predecessors.  Primitive plants move onto land, until then totally barren.  The
supercontinent of Gondwana drifted over the south pole, initiating a great Ice Age that gripped
the earth at this time. The end of the period is marked by an extinction event.

The Ordovician was originally divided into two epochs, Bala and Dyfed.  More recently, the
Tremadoc was removed from the Cambrian and a three-fold division of Ordovician strata
instituted.
 The Silurian Period:

Plants Move Onto Land

The Silurian Period follows the Ordovician Period in the Paleozoic Era. It began around 443
million years ago and lasted for 26 million years. Like the periods that have come before, the
Silurian is named for an ancient Celtic tribe that lived in Wales where the geologic evidence was
found.

Silurian Climate
The climate was much warmer during the Silurian Period. This caused the glaciers to melt and
the seas to rise. Even though the sea level was rising, there were places where the land was
slowly rising as well. This was due to mountain building as the continental plates collided. In
these places the seas moved away from the coasts or evaporated from the shallow areas. This
left salt deposits. Plants that had lived in the coastal water had to adapt to life on land or die.

The Silurian period is an interval of about 28 million years defined on the geologic timescale as
spanning roughly from 444 to 416 million years ago (mya) and lying between the earlier
Ordovician period and the later Devonian period. As with other geologic periods, the rock beds
defining the period's start and end are well identified, but the exact dates are uncertain by five to
ten million years.

The base of the Silurian is set at a major extinction event when 60 percent of marine species
were wiped out. (See Ordovician-Silurian extinction event.) As with all development, which takes
place in stages, the Silurian flora and fauna came on the foundation of earlier stages, including
this extinction, and in turn helped lay the foundation for life to the present. Silurian strata are the
source of some present-day deposits of oil, gas, and iron ore.

The Silurian system of fossil-bearing rock strata was originally identified in Wales, and it carries
the name of a Welsh tribe, the Silures. During the Silurian period, the supercontinent
Gondwanaland drifted slowly toward the southern pole, temperatures rose, sea ice and glaciers
melted, proto-Europe and North America collided pushing up mountains extant today from New
York state to Greenland and Norway, and sea levels were mostly high and stable with some
short-lived declines as the capacity of the ocean basins shifted. Over long intervals, the high
sea levels flooded vast, low-lying regions of the continents, producing warm, shallow seas that
nurtured the recovery of life after the devastating Ordovician-Silurian extinction. During the
Silurian period, life diversified considerably developing such various new life forms as coral
reefs, bony fish, fish with movable jaws, sea scorpions, early relatives of spiders and millipedes,
and vascular plants.
 The Devonian Period:

The Age of Fish

The Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era lasted from 417 million years ago to 354 million
years ago. It is named for Devon, England where the old red sandstone of the Devonian was
first studied.

The Continents of The Devonian

During the Devonian there were important changes in the land masses on the globe. North
America and Europe had collided forming a large continent called Euramerica. This caused the
formation of the Appalachian Mountain Range. The other large land mass was Gondwana. It
was made up of South America, Africa, Antarctica, India and Australia. These two large land
masses lay close to one another near the equator.

The two continents were moving toward each other throughout the Devonian Period. The
waterway between the two continents covered a subduction zone. This is an area where one
plate is moving underneath the other. Eventually this would mean that the two continents would
collide to form the supercontinent Pangea in the Permian Period. That event is more than 64
million years after the Devonian Period.

The Age of Fishes

The Devonian Period is known as the Age of Fishes. It is famous for the thousands of species of
fish that developed in Devonian seas. When fish first started to develop, they had no jaws and
the support structure was made of cartilage. This material doesn’t fossilize well, so the earliest
fossils were of fish whose outside skin was protected by scales and plates made of boney
tissue. These fish were called Ostracoderms. Their name means “shell-skins.” These animals
appear in rock from the late Silurian and early Devonian periods.

Fish with Jaws

The next development was the fish with jaws, gills and paired fins. The Placoderms were the
first fish to have all three of these characteristics. They still had the “shell skin” of the
Ostracoderms, but it mainly covered the head and neck area. The largest of the Placoderms
was the Dunkleosteus. It was a huge predator in the Devonian seas. It could be as long as 10
meters. Instead of teeth, it had large boney plates that stuck down in the front of its mouth
opening. The powerful jaws were deadly to other fish, sharks and even other Dunkleosteus.

Ancient Sharks
Sharks, or Chondricthyes, developed during the Devonian also. Sharks are thought to be
descendents of the large Placoderms, but they lost the ability to form the boney armor on the
outside of the body and were unable to form bones on the inside also. Their body is supported
by cartilage. Because of the skeletons of cartilage, very little fossil evidence is available. They
did leave behind their teeth. Much of the information we have about ancient sharks comes from
the many different types of fossil teeth that have been found. Sharks first appear in the middle
Devonian period.

The Bony Fish; Osteichthyes

The bony fish appear during the middle Devonian Period. The first of these are the lobe-fins.
These fish have pairs of fins with fleshy lobes at the base and more typical fin membranes at
the ends. The lobes contain jointed bones. These lobe-fins are thought to have evolved into
“legs” and eventually into amphibians that spend their lives both in and out of the water.

The coelacanth is a lobe-fin fish that developed during the Devonian Period. For years it was
thought to have gone extinct at the end of the Mesozoic Era along with the dinosaurs, but in
1938 a living coelacanth was caught. Since then coelacanths have been seen from time to time
in the Indian Ocean.

The Lung Fish

The Dipterus was a lungfish that developed during the Devonian Period. In many ways it
looked like the lobe-fins with bony flesh at the base of its fins. But the Dipterus had lung sacks
branching off of its throat that got air from the gills. During the Devonian Period, there were
huge swings of floods and drought. During drought times, when lakes turned into ponds, the
plants used all the oxygen in the little water that remained. A Dipterus that was stranded in such
a pool could stick its head out of the water and get the air it needed to stay alive.

The Reef Builders

The work of the sponges and corals went on through the Devonian Period. They built some of
the largest reefs in the world. Invertebrates grew well in Devonian seas too, so many new
species developed. The ammonite is one of these.

Mass Extinction Ends The Devonian Period

Species had begun to branch out and include both land and water habitats. The Devonian
Period ended with a mass extinction. The Devonian extinction hurt the water habits much more
than those on land. The sponges and corals were the most affected. No major reef building
happened again for thousands of years.
 Rodinia was the first supercontinent.
However, it was certainly the first global supercontinent -- incorporating essentially all of the
Earth's continents -- about which we have solid information.  Rodinia formed perhaps as early
as 1200 Mya.  Most of its mass was probably located in the low latitudes of the Northern
Hemisphere

About 1.2 billion years ago, fragments of continental crust, pushed together by plate tectonic
motion, began to assemble a giant continent.  Geologists affectionately use the term “Rodinia,”
a Russian word meaning “homeland,” for this giant continent of so long ago.

Rodinia was ripped apart during the Early Neoproterozoic (Tonian) by the Grenville Orogony,
which left enormous amounts of volcanic rock on many of today's continents.  Rodinia was
surrounded by a single ocean, called the Iapetus Ocean or Sea. Towards the end of the
Proterozoic, this supercontinent fragmented, giving rise to the late Ediacaran continents of
Pannotia, Siberia, and North China. From Pannotia in turn came the diverse continents of
Laurentia, Gondwana, and Baltica.

Though the exact size and Artist’s conception of the supercontinent

configuration of Rodinia are not Rodinia as it began to fragment 750 million
known, rocks of ancestral North years ago.  The future North America lies in
America, often called the center of the surrounding lands. The
“Laurentia,”  very likely formed breakup of this giant continent was the
the core of the giant continent.  beginning of Pacific Northwest geologic
history. Original painting by Tomo
  Narashima.

A reconstruction of the supercontinent

Rodinia 100 million years after breaking
apart.  Note the position of Alaska and
the western margin of North America
(labeled “Laurentia”).  The giant
continent split along the eastern margin
of what is today Washington State. The
future Pacific Northwest was a
tectonically quiet, passive continental
margin.