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541 million years ago an increase of oxygen occured.
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Most of the world's land was collected into the southern supercontinent Gondwana.
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Underwater life thrived.
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Aquatic life walked on the bottom of shallow water estuaries.
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Its vast swamp forests produced the coal from which the term Carboniferous, or "carbon-bearing," is derived from.
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The diversification of the early amniotes into the ancestral groups of the mammals, turtles, lepidosaurs, and archosaurs. The world at the time was dominated by two continents known as Pangaea and Siberia, surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa.
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Triassic began in the wake of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which left the Earth's biosphere impoverished; it was well into the middle of the Triassic before life recovered its former diversity. Therapsids and archosaurs were the chief terrestrial vertebrates during this time.
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Two extinction events occurred during this period: the Pliensbachian-Toarcian extinction in the Early Jurassic, and the Tithonian event at the end.
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a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels that created numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles, ammonites and rudists. During this time, new groups of mammals, birds, and plants, appeared.
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The Tertiary is no longer recognized as a formal unit by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, but the word is still widely used. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start of the Cenozoic Era, and extended to the beginning of the Quaternary glaciation at the end of the Pliocene Epoch.
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The continents slowly inched as the forces of plate tectonics push and tugged them. The slight shifts cause ice ages. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. Sea levels rose rapidly, and the continents achieved their present-day outline.
