ASW 8 Science C Block

India continued its slow-moving collision with Asia, which had already started the giant push-up of the Himalaya that continues today. Italy pushed into Europe, giving rise to the Alps. Spain butted France, and the Pyrenees rose.

presented in the collection: Cretaceous reptiles, including an impressive dinosaur co

collection

Our Fossil Plant Collection is a small but important representation of Canadian flora, particularly from the Cretaceous and Neogene (during what was formerly known as the Tertiary).

During the timeline of the era, several different events took place, eventually helping to shape the Earth as we know it today.

During the Proterozoic, the Earth had cooled considerably from the previous Hadean eon when the planet was covered by molten lava.

Near the end of the Proterozoic, ice sheets were growing towards the equator, and the entire planet was possibly engulfed under a thin layer of snow and ice.

The Paleozoic began with the Cambrian Period, 53 million years best known for ushering in an explosion of life on Earth

After the Ordovician Period came the Silurian Period (443 million years ago to 416 million years ago), which saw the spread of jawless fish throughout the seas.

In the Paleozoic Era, life flourished in the seas.

The Proterozoic Eon extended from 2.5 billion to 541 million years ago and is often divided into the Paleoproterozoic (2.5 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the Mesoproterozoic (1.6 billion to 1 billion years ago), and the Neoproterozoic (1 billion to 541 million years ago) eras.

Megascopic eukaryotes first appeared about 2.3 billion years ago and became widespread by about 1.8 billion years ago.

Eukaryotes employed a form of respiration and oxidative metabolism; they had a central nucleus that could split into separate sex cells, and so for the first time a mixed and variable genetic code could be passed to younger generations.

Rather than being a rapid extermination, the extinction may have been a more drawn-out transition. “In our interpretation,” Fanti says, “the end-Jurassic event was global in its effects but was mostly likely a complex sequence of local biological crises that are still poorly documented.”

if there was a mass extinction, it didn’t kill off life planetwide

Paleontologists have long debated whether or not there was a mass extinction at the end of the Jurassic period, 145 million years ago. The group that includes Machimosaurus, called the teleosaurids, is among those thought to have died out.

Online exhibits : Geologic time scale The Archean Eon and the Hadean The Archean eon, which preceded the Proterozoic eon, spanned about 1.5 billion years and is subdivided into four eras: the Neoarche

As cyanobacteria created more free oxygen, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere reached one percent of today’s level, which is 21 percent.

The Quaternary Period is a geologic time period that encompasses the most recent 2.6 million years — including the present day. Part of the Cenozoic Era, the period is usually divided into two epochs — the Pleistocene Epoch, which lasted from approximately 2 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago, and the Holocene Epoch, which began about 12,000 years ago

Some 250 million years ago, during the late Permian and early Triassic, the world was a greenhouse, much hotter than it is today.

Earth’s early atmosphere contained only small amounts of free oxygen

The oxygen-rich atmosphere that evolved later, and upon which oxygen-breathing life now depends, was a result of the origin of photosynthesis.

During the Precambrian, vast numbers of single-celled algae and cyanobacteria living in the seas eventually released enough oxygen to transform the environment.