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It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla.
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Much of the landmass that would become western North America was under a shallow ocean for much of the Silurian Period. These shallow waters enabled sunlight to penetrate, and marine animals underwent rapid differentiation.
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The animal Silurian went extinct.
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The Devonian, part of the Paleozoic era, is otherwise known as the Age of Fishes, as it spawned a remarkable variety of fish.
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The Carboniferous Period is famous for its vast swamp forests. Such swamps produced the coal from which the term Carboniferous
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The Permian period, which ended in the largest mass extinction the Earth has ever known, began about 299 million years ago.
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The start of the Triassic period (and the Mesozoic era) was a desolate time in Earth's history. Something—a bout of violent volcanic eruptions, climate change, or perhaps a fatal run-in with a comet or asteroid—had triggered the extinction of more than 90 percent of Earth's species.
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During the Jurassic Period, the supercontinent Pangaea split apart. The northern half, known as Laurentia, was splitting into landmasses that would eventually form North America and Eurasia, opening basins for the central Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico
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The most famous of all mass extinctions marks the end of the Cretaceous Period.
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In terms of major events, the Tertiary period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, at the start of the Cenozoic era, and lasted to the beginning of the most recent Ice Age at the end of the Pliocene epoch
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The Quaternary Period is most noted for its intervals of glacial and interglacial ages as well as the emergence of man. The Quaternary Period (aka the Great Ice Age)
