Found in rock samples retrieved in Australia more than 60 years ago, the microfossils dating to the Lower Ordovician Period, approximately 480 million years ago, fill an approximately 25-million-year ...

During the Ordovician period, part of the Paleozoic era, a rich variety of marine life flourished in the vast seas and the first primitive plants began to appear on land—before the second ...

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. .

Life also started occupying new ecological niches, clinging to plants floating in the ocean's water column and burrowing deep into the seabed. Like the Cambrian, the Ordovician was a period when ...

The Late Ordovician period, ending 444 million years ago, was marked by the onset of glaciations. The expansion of non-vascular land plants accelerated chemical weathering and may have drawn down ...

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.

The first land plants appeared around 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, when life was diversifying rapidly . They were non-vascular plants, … Moss age Never underestimate ...

For most of the Ordovician, plants thrived in Antarctica. That changed when the temperature dropped by 8°C and ice crept over the poles. Winters got colder and summers hotter.

Microfossils found in Australia reveal early plants evolved from simple cellularity to complex multicellularity approximately 25 million years earlier than previously thought, a new understanding ...