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The Paleozoic Era - Coggle Diagram
The Paleozoic Era
Divided in six
periods.
The Cambrian Period
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The ice sheets melted which result in rising sea levels. This flooding expanded the habitats for early Paleozoic marine organisms.
The Ordovician Period
Throughout the Ordovician, Gondwanaland shifted southward, finally settling on top of the South Pole.
• South America, Australia, Antarctica and India were merging together to form a new supercontinent called Gondwanaland.
The Silurian Period
The earliest known plants with a vascular system appeared mostly in wetlands. Air breathing scorpions and millipedes were common land animals.
The world´s climate began to stabilize and warm, which resulted in the melting of many large glaciers and a general rise in sea level
The Devonian Period
The climate was warm and moist, this allowed plants to spread over the land surface and lowland forests of trees and ferns flourished.
The ancestral continents of Europe and North America merged to form another ancestral supercontinent known as Laurasia which was positioned near the equator.
The fishes diversified into many groups like sharks and bony fishes. The most important were lobe -finned fishes because they gave rise to land living terrestrial vertebrates.
The Carboniferous Period
The name carboniferous or “carbon - bearing” refers to swampy conditions that produced widespread coal deposits.
Protoclepsydrops
Insects underwent rapid changes that led to diverse forms, including giant cockroaches and dragonflies with wingspans of 80cm.
Throughout this period, Pangaea was formed. The collision of these landmasses contributed to great mountain building.
The Permian Period
Mountain uplift blocked moisture winds from the continental interiors, causing much of Pangaea ´s interior to become dry and arid.
All landmasses together also changed the level of the oceans, sea level was lowered. This is one of the factors that may have led to extinction of many living things at the end of the period
Evolution of shelled organisms that have hard parts that are more likely to be preserved as fossils.