JUST over half a billion years ago, evolution hit a purple patch. In the space of a few million years, once-empty seas were suddenly overrun by all manner of newfangled life forms. Animals had ...

Many life forms, especially ancient ones, are so hard to categorize that scientists don’t even know whether they are plant or animal. They call these organisms the “Problematica.” ...

Unique fossil site discovered in Wales reveals early life forms By Katie Hunt, CNN ... Castle Bank dates from 50 million years later in the Middle Ordovician. ...

Ordovician sea life. Credit: Fritz Geller-Grimm / National Museum of Natural History / CC BY-SA 2.5. Schematic diagram of species loss controlled by climate change during the LOME.

The planet’s first death knell sounded 444 million years ago, near the end of the Ordovician Period.* Simple forms of life — mainly bacteria and archaea — had already flourished for 3 billion years.

The geology of the Oxford, Ohio area includes (but is not limited to) the following rocks and features: Limestone Southwestern Ohio's limestone (a sedimentary rock) is saturated with life — life from ...

Most life on Earth still lived in the oceans, but plants were beginning to emerge on land. Then, near the end of the Ordovician, a sweeping climate shift left the supercontinent covered with glaciers.

Fossil Content of Local Limestone. The fossil content of local limestone shows the diversity of life in the late Ordovician period. Bryozoans and brachiopods, nearly equal in abundance, form about 60% ...

It's a description that seems at odds with paleogeology textbooks’ account of the Ordovician. The 45-million-year-long period is characterized there as a time of flourishing biodiversity.

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience community and the public. Among them, the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME ...