Compared to the history of the earth, our human history is only a moment. The earth has undergone earth-shaking changes, and although the changes have been slow, they are larger than the territorial changes of any country in history.
At that time, the first continent of the Earth, the continent of Rodinha, had just formed. The continent of Rodinha is thought to have been formed by the aggregation of thousands of volcanic islands, and before that the earth was a vast ocean, with only a few volcanic islands. Today's continents were far from formed at the time, and the land area was much smaller than it is today.
The continent of Rhodinia continued to expand during this time, but soon disintegrated into the continents of Gondwana (including present-day Africa, South America, the Indian Peninsula, the Arabian Peninsula, Antarctica and Australia) and the continent of Laurencia (including most of present-day Eurasia and North America), when gondwana was much larger than the continent of Laurencia, because most of today's North American land is sunk on the seabed, and today's Eurasian continent is almost no shadow at that time
It was an era when arthropods and molluscs competed for supremacy over the oceans. Trilobites flourished most during this era. In the ocean, there have been top predators such as odd shrimp, broad-winged horseshoe crabs, and giant nautilus. However, at the end of the Ordovician period, gamma-ray bursts that may have caused a large number of marine life to go extinct due to a large explosion of supernovae. At the end of the Ordovician, fish, as the earliest vertebrates, came to the stage of history
The Silurian period 425 million years ago and the Devonian period 390 million years ago. The Distribution of Land and Sea in the Silurian and Ordovician periods is not much different, and the continent of Gondwana is relatively small. Today, the northern land of our country is gradually expanding at that time, and the land of southern China has begun to form, although it is still only a series of islands. During the Devonian Period, the continent of Lawrence expanded and its constituent parts began to converge.
From the Silurian to the Devonian period, the land area began to expand, and perhaps because of this, land animals and plants appeared during the Silurian and Devonian periods. Initially, arthropods gradually developed to land, and then some fish gradually evolved limbs and lungs, evolving the earliest amphibian heyme salamander
And in the ocean, fish take the dominant position. The earliest sharks appeared in the Devonian Period, but early sharks did not have an advantage in the Devonian Period. The Dunn's fish, which belongs to the shield fish, was the top predator of the Devonian ocean
During the Carboniferous period, the Paleozoic ocean between Laurencia and the gondwana continent began to close, forming the Appalachian and Veliscan Mountains.
The Carboniferous period was an era of great development of terrestrial plants, with a large number of ferns and gymnosperms covering 99% of the continent, which was the era of the highest forest coverage and the richest oxygen content in the history of the earth. Dwarfs other eras, including the Mesozoic era ruled by dinosaurs. After a large number of plants died, buried in the ground and eventually formed coal, which is the origin of the name of this geological age.
The Carboniferous period was also the time when life first flew into the sky. There are giant-tailed dragonflies with wingspans of up to one meter in the air. On land, there are various giant insects and arthropods. Giant amphibians occupy the status of top predators on land. The oil shale lizard was particularly inconspicuous in the Carboniferous forests as the earliest reptiles, but for more than 200 million years after the Carboniferous Period, it will be the era when reptiles have an absolute advantage
In the Permian Period, with the exception of Siberia and northern and southern China, the rest of the continents were almost all gathered together, and the Pan-Archaea was formed. Between the Pan-Archean continent, Siberia, and north and south China formed a vast inland sea known as the Tethys Sea, also known as the Ancient Mediterranean Sea.
The Land of the Permian was ruled by mammal-like reptiles, and the main predator of the early Permian, Allodonosaurus, although it may have been mistaken for a dinosaur in appearance, was actually more closely related to mammals. Mammal-like reptiles developed very rapidly in the Permian, and by the late Permian, the dipterodons and reedodonates were morphologically closer and closer to the early mammals. Unfortunately, at the end of the Permian, there was the largest mass extinction in earth's history. It is estimated that more than 95 per cent of marine life species and more than 70 per cent of terrestrial species are completely extinct. Trilobites have completely withdrawn from the stage of history, and fish, amphibians, and reptiles have all been severely hit. It was not until the Jurassic period that species diversity gradually returned to pre-Permian extinctions
During the Triassic period, the Pan-Paleontopia expanded further, and with the exception of Asia, the plates of the remaining continents were almost the same as they are today. Almost all continents converge, with only southern China still hanging abroad, separating the Tethys Sea from the Pan-Archean Ocean.
During the Triassic period, mammalian reptiles still retained some competitiveness, but almost all of them were plant-eaters or small burrowing animals. The top predators on land are the main dragons such as the Post crocodile and the Fassola crocodile. Dinosaurs first appeared in the Triassic period. But it became a winner in the fierce competition with other land reptiles in the late Triassic. At the same time, reptiles also began to march into the sky and ocean, and the earliest pterosaurs appeared in the Triassic, although they were not even as large as many modern birds, but at that time they were enough to become the rulers of the sky. In the ocean, there are various aquatic reptiles such as lint-toothed dragons, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and plesiosaurs. Ichthyosaurs became the most successful marine predators in the Triassic, and New Zealand ichthyosaurs, which may be larger than blue whales, are perhaps the largest animals known.
During the Luo Dynasty, the Pan-Paleo Continent began to split into Gondwana and Laurencia about 180 million years ago, only this time the continent of Laurencia was comparable in size to the continent of Gondwana. Today's China was already close to Siberia, and the Asian section was initially formed, leaving only Europe or a series of islands. Between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, the Atlantic Ocean began to form and began to widen as the Americas and Europe moved away from Africa.
After the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic period, there were no more species on land that could compete with dinosaurs for dominance, and dinosaurs were everywhere on every continent, including Antarctica. Mammal-like reptiles did not survive the Triassic extinction event, only the immediate ancestors of mammals survived, and the paleozoa that appeared in the Middle Jurassic are generally considered to be the ancestors of marsupials and placental mammals. In the late Jurassic period, a branch of theropod dinosaurs gradually evolved into birds, and dinosaurs such as Archaeopteryx appeared that were already very close to birds in structure.
Reptiles can be said to have fully flowered on land, sea and air throughout the Mesozoic Era, and although the diversity of marine reptiles has decreased after the Triassic mass extinction, it still maintains the status of the top predators of the ocean. Ichthyosaurs suffered heavy losses at the end of the Triassic period, and ichthyosaurs were generally smaller during the Jurassic period, but they were extremely numerous, such as the big-eyed ichthyosaurs, which were the most common marine reptiles in the late Jurassic period. A branch of plesiosaurs evolved into the Plesiosaurs, and although few Plesiosaurs of the Jurassic period were actually more than 10 meters in size, although far inferior to some Triassic ichthyosaurs and Cretaceous plesiosaurs, they were the top predators of the Jurassic oceans.
During the Cretaceous period, continental plates gradually drifted to form the prototype of the modern five continents. During the middle Cretaceous period, there was an era of massive transgressions, rising sea levels, submerging large amounts of land, a series of islands in Europe smaller than during the Jurassic period, and Africa divided into two parts by seawater. North America, on the other hand, is divided into four parts. Antarctica, the Indian Peninsula and Australia also separated. The continents of Gondwana and Laurencia thus disintegrated. The Atlantic Ocean continues to expand. By the end of the Cretaceous Period, the sea had receded, the European continent had begun to form, Australia and Antarctica were once again joined together, but sooner or later they would have to separate, and the Indian peninsula continued to move northward, beginning to approach the Asian continent. Sea levels were generally higher than they are now, and central North America remained an inland sea. The plates of all continents are close to modern times.
Due to the influence of the Jurassic film series, many people may think that the Jurassic was the era when dinosaurs flourished. In fact, the Cretaceous period was the peak of the dinosaurs. It is far superior to the Jurassic in terms of species diversity, number of species and the size of giant dinosaurs. The most famous Tyrannosaurus rex was only on the stage of history at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The platypus, horned dragons, ankylosaurs, swollen-headed dinosaurs and many different types of theropod dinosaurs appeared only in the Cretaceous Period, and the prosperity of these ornithischian dinosaurs may be closely related to the newly emerging angiosperms in the Cretaceous Period. Feathered dinosaurs led to a major development in the Cretaceous, and a large number of feathered dinosaurs or early bird fossils in The Rehe biota in China support the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Different species of mammals also began to appear in the late Cretaceous period, with the earliest primate Purgatori monkeys appearing in the Cretaceous. At the end of the Cretaceous period, the pterosaurs in the sky also evolved into a pterosaur with a wingspan of more than ten meters, which is the largest flying animal in history.
In the Cretaceous ocean, plesiosaurs and plesiosaurs continued to develop, ichthyosaurs gradually withdrew from the historical stage in the middle of the Cretaceous Period, sea turtles also quietly appeared in the Cretaceous, and even birds such as dusk birds and fishbirds also occupied a place in the ocean. The ocean has never lacked new challengers, in the late Cretaceous period, the dragons appeared shockingly, they were originally only lizards with a body length of less than one meter, but in just a few million years evolved many species such as canglong, neptunosaur, hynososaurus and many other species with a body length of more than ten meters, and may even be close to twenty meters, and eventually replaced sharks and plesiosaurs and became the kings of the Cretaceous ocean. A legend in the evolutionary history of species was staged.