Tertiary

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Tertiary

The Tertiary is a a term for a geologic period

Geologic time scale

File:Geologic clock.jpgThe geologic time scale is a chronology schema relating stratigraphy to time that is used by geologys and other earth sciences scientists to describe the timing and relationships between events that have occurred during the history of the Earth....
65 million to 1.8 million years ago. The Tertiary covered the time span between the superseded Secondary period and an out-of-date definition of the Quaternary period

Neogene

The Neogene is a Geologic time scale#Terminology starting 23.03 ? 0.05 million years ago and lasting either until today or ending 2.588 million years ago with the beginning of the Quaternary....
. The period began with the demise of the non-avian

Bird

Birds are wing, Bipedalismal, endothermic , vertebrate animals that lay egg . There are around 10,000 living species, making them the most numerous tetrapod vertebrates....
dinosaur

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrate animals of Landform ecosystems for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic Period until the end of the Cretaceous Period , when most of them became extinct in the Cretaceous?Tertiary extinction event....
s in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, at start of the Cenozoic era

Cenozoic

The Cenozoic Era...
, spanning to beginning of the most recent Ice Age

Ice age

The general term "ice age" or, more precisely, "glacial age" denotes a geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in an expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers....
, at the end of the Pliocene epoch

Pliocene

The Pliocene epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 1.806 million years before present.The Pliocene is the second epoch of the Neogene period in the Cenozoic era....
.

term Tertiary was first used by Giovanni Arduino

Giovanni Arduino (geologist)

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Encyclopedia

The Tertiary is a a term for a geologic period

Geologic time scale

Neogene

Bird

Birds are wing, Bipedalismal, endothermic , vertebrate animals that lay egg . There are around 10,000 living species, making them the most numerous tetrapod vertebrates....
dinosaur

Dinosaur

Cenozoic

The Cenozoic Era...
, spanning to beginning of the most recent Ice Age

Ice age

Pliocene

Historical use of the term

The term Tertiary was first used by Giovanni Arduino

Giovanni Arduino (geologist)

Giovanni Arduino was an Italy geologist who is known as the "Father of Italian Geology".Arduino was born at Caprino Veronese, Veneto. He was a mining specialist who developed possibly the first classification of geological time, based on study of the geology of northern Italy....
in 1759. He classified geologic time into primitive (or primary), secondary, and tertiary periods based on observations of geology in northern Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
. Later a fourth period, the Quaternary

Quaternary

The Quaternary Period is the Geologic Time Scale period after the Neogene Period, spanning 1.805 +/- 0.005 million years ago to the present. The Quaternary includes two geologic epochs: the Pleistocene and the Holocene epoch ....
, was applied. In 1828, Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell

Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Order of the Thistle, Fellow of the Royal Society was a Scotland lawyer, geologist, and protagonist of Uniformitarianism ....
incorporated a Tertiary period into his own, far more detailed system of classification. He subdivided the Tertiary period into four epochs according to the percentage of fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or trace fossil of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous Rock formations and sedimentary rock layers is known as the fossil record....
mollusks resembling modern species found in those strata

Stratum

In geology and related fields, a stratum is a layer of rock or soil with internally consistent characteristics that distinguishes it from contiguous layers....
. He used Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
names: Eocene, Miocene, Older Pliocene and Newer Pliocene. Although these divisions seemed adequate for the region to which the designations were originally applied (parts of the Alps

Alps

The Alps is the name for one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east; through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany; to France in the west....
and plains of Italy), when the same system was later extended to other parts of Europe and to America, it proved to be inapplicable. Therefore, later the use of mollusks was abandoned from the definition and the epochs were renamed and redefined.

Geological events

Tectonic

Plate tectonics

Plate tectonics describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere. The theory encompasses the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century by Alfred Wegener, and seafloor spreading, understood during the 1960s....
activity continued as Gondwana

Gondwana

Gondwana , originally Gondwanaland is the name given to a southern precursor-supercontinent and then as a remnant separated from Laurasia 180- during the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent that existed about 500 to 200 Annum ago into two large segments. finally split completely apart, and India

India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
collided with the Eurasian plate

Eurasian Plate

The Eurasian Plate is a tectonic plate which includes most of the continent of Eurasia , with the notable exceptions of the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian subcontinent, and the area east of the Chersky Range in East Siberia....
. South America

South America

South America is the southern continent of the Americas, situated entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere....
was connected to North America

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
toward the end of the Tertiary. Antarctica

Antarctica

Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent, overlying the South Pole. It is situated in the Antarctica of the southern hemisphere, almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle, and is surrounded by the Southern Ocean....
— which was already separate — drifted to its current position over the South Pole

South Pole

The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is one of the two points where the Earth's rotation intersects the surface....
. Widespread volcanic activity was prevalent.

Climate

Climate encompasses the temperatures, humidity, atmospheric pressure, winds, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and numerous other Meteorology elements in a given region over long periods of time, as opposed to the term weather, which refers to current activity of these same elements....
s during the Tertiary slowly cooled, starting off in the Paleocene

Paleocene

The Paleocene or Palaeocene, "early dawn of the recent" is a geologic epoch that lasted from 65.5 ? 0.3 Mega-annum to 55.8 ? 0.2 Ma . It is the first epoch of the Palaeogene Period in the modern Cenozoic era ....
with tropical-to-moderate worldwide temperatures and ending up with extensive glaciations at the end of the period.

Life form events

At the beginning of the period, mammal

Mammal

Mammals are a class of vertebrate animals whose name is derived from their distinctive feature, mammary glands, with which they feed their young....
s replaced reptile

Reptile

Reptiles, or members of the class Reptilia, are air-breathing, cold-blooded vertebrates that have skin covered in scale as opposed to hair or feathers....
s as the dominant vertebrate

Vertebrate

Vertebrates are members of the subphylum Vertebrata, chordates with Vertebras or Vertebral columns. The grouping sometimes includes the hagfish, which have no vertebrae, but are genetically quite closely related to lampreys, which do have vertebrae....
s. Each epoch of the Tertiary was marked by striking developments in mammalian life. The earliest recognizable hominoid relatives of human

Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s, Proconsul
Proconsul (genus)

Proconsul was an early genus of primates that existed from 27 to 17 million years ago during the Miocene epoch, first in Kenya, and restricted to Africa....
and Australopithecus
Australopithecus

The genus Australopithecus is a genus of extinction hominids, made up of the gracile australopiths, and formerly also included their larger relatives, the robust australopiths ....
, also. Modern types of birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish

Fish

A fish is any marine biology vertebrate animal that is typically ectothermic , covered with scale , and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins....
, and invertebrate

Invertebrate

An invertebrate is an animal lacking a vertebral column. The group includes 98% of all animal species ? all animals except those in the Chordate subphylum vertebrate ....
s were either already numerous at the beginning of the period or appeared early in its history. Modern families of flowering plants evolved

Evolution

In biology, evolution is change in the heritability trait of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. These changes are caused by a combination of three main processes: variation, reproduction, and selection....
. Marine invertebrates and non-mammal marine vertebrates experienced only modest evolution.