Over the last few posts, we’ve covered everything from the diversification of life in the Cambrian Explosion, to the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history, the Great Dying, and the age of the dinosaurs. Today, though, I’ll be talking about one of the least discussed eras on the entire Geologic Timescale: the Cenozoic. While you might not recognize the name, it’s actually […]

You might not recognize the name Mesozoic, but I’m confident you’ll have heard of the periods contained in the Mesozoic era. Today we’re talking about the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, which are quite possibly the most famous periods on the Geologic time scale. The time of the “terrible lizards” spanned over 180 million years, and gave rise to some of the […]

The late Paleozoic usually spans from the beginning of the Devonian period (417 Ma) to the end of the Permian Period and the Great Dying (248 Ma). Since I talked about the Devonian and its mass extinction last week, in this post I’ll be focusing on the Carboniferous Period through the Permian and the Great Dying. For only covering a relatively short […]

When creating the geologic timescale, scientists were faced with a dilemma: how to break down time into manageable chunks. Luckily for them, the Earth has faced some pretty “world-changing” events, both good–the evolution of new life forms–and bad–mass extinctions. So, when deciding how to end the 3.5 billion year-long Precambrian, the scientists decided to start a new era, the Paleozoic, at the […]

The Precambrian includes about 3.5 billion years of Earth’s history and is so named because it lasted until the Cambrian explosion, when almost all multicellular life on Earth evolved. The Precambrian is by far the longest era in the Geologic timescale and it saw the early evolution of the Earth itself. Despite this, relatively little is known about this period of time […]