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. .

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Not many plants had made it out of the ocean – but those few mosses and worts that had eked out a life on land by the end of the period would have had a big effect on the planet.

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.

One such event was the Ordovician Mass Extinction, almost 400 million years ago, according to IFLScience. This period in time was extremely different from the world we know today, as life did not ...