ERSC 3P03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Paleozoic, Calcite, Foraminifera
9 Jan 2017
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Nearly 90% of earth history is precambrian (i. e. before the cambrian period/ paleozoic era) but most of the major milestones in the evolution of life occurred since the base of the. Cambrian (during the phanerozoic eon= time of visible life , beginning ~542 ma) Phanerozoic, from the ancient greek (cid:545) (cid:546)and , meaning visible life the rock record of macroscopic, skeletonized life allows three eras-paleozoic, mesozoic & cenozoic-to be identified based on their fossil content (boundaries marked by mass extinctions) Fossils were not universally accepted to be the remains of organisms until the renaissance/ In the 17thc stenorecognised that the teeth in a dead shark closely resembled. Glossopetrae (tongue-stones), and he hypothesised that sediments lithified around remains that fossilised. Even today, living relatives are important-it is hard to imagine how the cephalopod affinities of ammonites could have been inferred prior to 1829, when the first living chambered nautiluswas discovered.
