History of Life by Benton Michael J.;

Author:Benton, Michael J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Forests and flight

In Carboniferous forests dragonflies grew as big as ravens. Trees and other vegetation likewise attained outsized proportions …

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

These are the lasting images of the Carboniferous – great forests of strange fern-like trees, and huge insects flying between their trunks. The other image of course is of the legacy of those lush forests, the vast coal mines where tons of coal are stripped from the surface or hewn from coal seams at depth. The Carboniferous was a crucial time in the evolution of life on land. This was the time when plants and animals really cemented their land-living adaptations, and took on all habitats and all continents. The rapid rise of insects, tetrapods, and plants marked the future structure of terrestrial ecosystems.

Life in the sea was no less rich. Tropical reefs abounded, some of them a kilometre or more in length, and composed of dozens of species of corals. Brachiopods, molluscs, and echinoderms lived among those reef organisms, and conical and coiled molluscs swam above side by side with sharks and other fishes, some of them like modern forms, others much more weird and wonderful. Some Carboniferous sharks were long and thin, others were deep-bodied, some had long pointed snouts, others had great coils of teeth at the front of their mouths, and some even had great bony spines covered in teeth that extended like sunshades from their foreheads.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.