Geological Time Scale

  • Cambrian Period 570-500 MYA

    Cambrian Period 570-500 MYA
    The Cambrian Period had an abundunt amount of marine organisms and the earth was covered in Oceans. All life was in the Oceans
  • Ordovician Period

    Ordovician Period
    The Ordovician /ɔrdəˈvɪʃən/ is a geologic period and system, the second of six of the Paleozoic Era, and covers the time between 485.4 ± 1.9 and 443.8 ± 1.5 million years ago
  • Silurian Period

    Silurian Period
    The Silurian is a geologic period and system that extends from the end of the Ordovician Period, at 443.8 ± 1.5 million years ago (mya), to the beginning of the Devonian Period.
  • Devonian Period

    Devonian Period
    The Devonian is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic Era spanning from the end of the Silurian Period, about 419.2 ± 3.2 Mya (million years ago), to the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, about 358.9 ± 0.4.
  • Carboniferous Period

    Carboniferous Period
    The Carboniferous is a geologic period and system that extends from the end of the Devonian Period, at 358.9 ± 0.4 million years ago, to the beginning of the Permian Period, at 298.9 ± 0.15 Ma. The name Carboniferous means "coal-bearing" and derives from the Latin words carbō (“coal”) and ferō (“I bear, I carry”), and was coined by geologists William Conybeare and William Phillips in 1822.
  • Permian Period

    Permian Period
    The Permian is a geologic period and system which extends from 298.9 ± 0.15 to 252.17 ± 0.06 million years ago.[5] It is the last period of the Paleozoic, following the Carboniferous and preceding the Triassic of the Mesozoic. The concept of the Permian was introduced in 1841 by geologist Sir Roderick Murchison, who named it after the ancient kingdom of Permia.
  • Triassic Period

    Triassic Period
    The Triassic began in the wake of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which left the Earth's biosphere impoverished; it would take well into the middle of the period for life to recover its former diversity. Therapsids and archosaurs were the chief terrestrial vertebrates during this time. A specialized subgroup of archosaurs, dinosaurs, first appeared in the Late Triassic but did not become dominant until the succeeding Jurassic.[6] The first true mammals, themselves a specialized subgroup o
  • Jurrasic Period

    Jurrasic Period
    The Jurassic constitutes the middle period of the Mesozoic Era, also known as the Age of Reptiles. The start of the period is marked by the major Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. Two other extinction events occurred during the period: the Late Pliensbachian/Early Toarcian event in the Early Jurassic, and the Late Tithonian event at the end; however, neither event ranks among the "Big Five" mass extinctions.
  • Cretaceous Period

    Cretaceous Period
    The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels and creating numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles, ammonites and rudists, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. At the same time, new groups of mammals and birds, as well as flowering plants, appeared. The Cretaceous ended with a large mass extinction, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, in which many groups, including no
  • Tertiary Period

    Tertiary Period
    Tertiary is the former term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.58 million years ago, a time span that lies between the superseded Secondary period and the Quaternary. The Tertiary is no longer recognized as a formal unit by the International Commission on Stratigraphy,[1][2][3][4] but the word is still widely used. The traditional span of the Tertiary has been divided between the Paleogene and Neogene Periods and extends to the first stage of the Pleistocene Epoch, the Gelasian age.
  • Quaternary Period

    Quaternary Period
    The term Quaternary ("fourth") was proposed by Giovanni Arduino in 1759 for alluvial deposits in the Po River valley in northern Italy. It was introduced by Jules Desnoyers in 1829 for sediments of France's Seine Basin that seemed clearly to be younger than Tertiary Period rocks. The Quaternary Period follows the Neogene Period and extends to the present. The Quaternary covers the time span of glaciations classified as the Pleistocene, and includes the present interglacial period, the Holocene.