What was the Ordovician Period?
💡 490 to 443 Million Years Ago The Ordovician period began approximately 510 million years ago, with the end of the Cambrian, and then ended around 445 million years ago, with the beginning of the Silurian Era. 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. universe-review.ca/option2.htm The Ordovician is best known for the presence of its diverse marine invertebrates, including graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, and the conodonts ( or early vertebrates). A typical marine community consisted of these animals, plus red and green algae Stromatolite, 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 la
The Ordovician period is the second geological period in the Paleozoic Era, which makes up the last 542 million years of life on Earth, the period during which complex multicellular organisms appear in the fossil record. The Ordovician period extends from roughly 490 to 440 million years ago. It is preceded by the Cambrian period and followed by the Silurian period. In this period, Earth’s biosphere built on evolutionary successes from the Cambrian period. The number of marine fauna genera increased fourfold, and near the end of the Ordovician period, the intensity and diversity of bioeroding organisms exploded, leading to fewer well-preserved fossils than before. During the Ordovician period, sea life dominated. There were simple plants and fungi on the land, but otherwise not much. The southern continents were aggregated into a supercontinent called Gondwana, which started off near the equator and eventually moved to cover the South Pole. The sea floor was relatively warm and shallow
