Carboniferous

The Massest of Mass Extinctions With all the post-apocalyptic themed movies coming out of Hollywood, most people are probably familiar with the concept of a mass extinction. In those kind of movies the cause is often a manmade problem, such as nuclear war. However, in the earth’s distant past, we were not around to destroy ourselves. So what happened? 250 million years ago the Permian period came to an end in a mass extinction causing 95% of species living in the ocean to die (Cort, 2006). To paint a picture of the Permian into your mind, forget all you learned in grade 8 geography class; all the continents we know today were stuck together, forming a supercontinent called Pangaea. This is a time after the Carboniferous period, a period…

n the Carboniferous Period, specifically in the Pennsylvanian subsystem, between 323 and 299 million years ago, a substantial change occurred around the planet: the climate increased strongly so that oceans growed up more than two hundred meters above the level existed immediately before this period. The increase of the level of water allowed the developing and diversification of the first vascular plants, i.e., plants that alternate generations between the sexual gamete production (gametophyte)…

The Great Dividing Ranges also known as the Eastern Ranges are a mountain range geographically located in Australia. The great ranges spand from the north eastern tip of Queensland down southwards to the edge of New South Wales eventually ending in the west most part of Victoria. In total the Ranges length rounds off to a distance of 3,500 kilometres, long enough to earn it the title of third longest land based range in the world. The width of the range varies slightly along its length from…

The Permian Period The Permian Period is the last one, after the Carboniferous Period, of the Paleozoic Era lasting for about 46 to 47 million years from 299-252 million years ago (mya) (Smith 2011). One major feature of this period is the formation of the supercontinent, Pangaea which affected the environment and the climate as well which gave rise to new species. Another distinct feature is the greatest mass extinction event which killed around 54% of all marine families and most of the…

naturally digest. So, vertebrates must rely on gut bacteria that are capable of digesting cellulose through fermentation. This symbiotic relationship would be facilitated by thermoregulation, as gut bacteria possess an ideal habitable temperature range. Plant digestion would also be facilitated through enhanced means of mechanical digestion, such as blunt teeth, a strong jaw capable of crushing plant matter, and a jaw capable of grinding-motion. Herbivory is unknown among the first tetrapods but…

Hyperoartia only have one creature per class, the former being hagfish and the latter being lampreys. The class Myxiniare found anywhere from the depths of the sea to the shallowest areas of the oceans. The Hyperaortia originated in the Atlantic Ocean and have migrated to the Great Lakes. The next class, Placodermi, are an extinct group of armored fish. The class Chrondrichthyes are cartilaginous fish found alongside the class, Actinopterygii, otherwise known as the bony fish, in various aquatic…

meaning that their body heat was regulated by external heat sources, which proved a problem in the rapidly shifting weather and temperature patterns of the Permian. They were replaced as the dominant land animals by warm-blooded (a trait that put them at a disadvantage during the Permian Extinction, as they needed to eat more to maintain their body heat) synapsids, more specifically therapsids, in the Middle and Late Permian. Aquatic animals included early fish, bacteria, archaea, and…

the inside of Earth was fluid, and disagreeing with Lord Kelvin on the age of the earth. After closely observing a globe it shows that the continents come together like a puzzle : the west African coastline seems to fit into the east coast of South America and the Caribbean sea; and the same appears across the Pacific. The fit is even more striking when the submerged continental shelves are compared rather than the coastlines. In 1912 Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) noticed the same thing and…

their structure was just cartilage. The first fish with jaws was the Placoderms. At the end of this period there was a mass extinction sadly this extinction effected the Devonian water habits and the land. The most affected species were sponge and coral. The climate was relatively warm and dry in some regions. The fifth period was the Carboniferous Period during this period there was large amounts of coal deposits underground. Also the effects of having various amounts of vegetation grow caused…

Benton (1995), but Barnosky et al. (2011) also found the following data disparity in literature: 1) sparse, patchy data on fossil record that varied considerably on geography, 2) lack of data on all taxa that creates the possibility of analysis on a subset of available taxa, 3) analysis is usually based on genus, not on species level, 4) extinction is only considered when no fossil record is observed, therefore underestimates the actual extinction of species, 5) discontinuous sampling of…