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PERMIAN : Largest Mass Extinction > 
The Permian period lasted from 290 to 248 million years ago and was the last period of the Paleozoic Era. The distinction between the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic is made at the end of the Permian in recognition of the largest mass extinction recorded in the history of life on Earth. It affected many groups of organisms in many different environments, but it affected marine communities the most by far, causing the extinction of most of the marine invertebrates of the time.
The global geography of the Permian included massive areas of land and water. By the beginning of the Permian, the motion of the Earth's crustal plates had brought much of the total land together, fused in a supercontinent known as Pangea. Many of the continents of today in somewhat intact form met in Pangea (only Asia was broken up at the time), which stretched from the northern to the southern pole. Most of the rest of the surface area of the Earth was occupied by a corresponding single ocean, known as Panthalassa, with a smaller sea to the east of Pangea known as Tethys.
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More on this Website >
• http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/permian/permian.html
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MESOZOIC : Age of Dinosaurs
The Mesozoic is known as the Age of Dinosaurs. It also saw the development of early birds and mammals, and of flowering plants (angiosperms). At the end of the Mesozoic,... |
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Alfred Wegener, Discovery Plate Tectonics
German climatologist and geophysicist who, in 1915, published as expanded version of his 1912 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. This work was one of the first to... |
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