What animals lived during the Ordovician period?
The Ordovician is best known for its diverse marine invertebrates, including graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, and the conodonts (early vertebrates). A typical marine community consisted of these animals, plus red and green algae, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals, crinoids, and gastropods.
What type of animals lived during the Paleozoic era?
What animals lived in the Paleozoic Era? Animals that lived in the Paleozoic Era included marine life such as trilobites, fish, and sea sponges. Land life also evolved such as amphibians and reptiles.
What animals survived the Ordovician extinction?
All of the major animal groups of the Ordovician oceans survived, including trilobites, brachiopods, corals, crinoids and graptolites, but each lost important members. Widespread families of trilobites disappeared and graptolites came close to total extinction.
Is Ordovician in Paleozoic?
Ordovician Period, in geologic time, the second period of the Paleozoic Era. It began 485.4 million years ago, following the Cambrian Period, and ended 443.8 million years ago, when the Silurian Period began.
What are the 5 mass extinctions?
Top Five Extinctions
- Ordovician-silurian Extinction: 440 million years ago.
- Devonian Extinction: 365 million years ago.
- Permian-triassic Extinction: 250 million years ago.
- Triassic-jurassic Extinction: 210 million years ago.
- Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction: 65 Million Years Ago.
What animals died in the Devonian extinction?
Changes in the late Devonian hit shallow, warm waters extremely hard and fossil records indicate that this is where the most extinction occurred. In all, about 20% of all marine families went extinct. Groups particularly impacted included jawless fish, brachiopods, ammonites, and trilobites.
What happened to animal life at the end of the Early Paleozoic?
The Permian extinction, at the end of the Paleozoic Era, eliminated such major invertebrate groups as the blastoids (an extinct group of echinoderms related to the modern starfish and sea lilies), fusulinids, and trilobites.
What are the 5 great extinctions?
What was the dominant predator 470 million years ago?
The big tentacled fellow in the middle and his friends in the background were the dominant predators of that time. These cephalopods were distant relatives of squids and octopi with large, straight shells that could reach nine feet in length! The big one has snared a trilobite with its tentacles.
Where are Ordovician fossils found?
During most of the Ordovician, Kentucky was covered by shallow tropical seas. Accordingly, the fossils found in Kentucky’s Ordovician rocks are marine (sea-dwelling) invertebrates.
What is the fauna of the Ordovician period?
Artist’s depiction of the rich fauna of the Ordovician. Animals include, from left: Cystoids, jawless fish ( Sacabambaspis) captured by a large cephalopod ( Endoceras ), Rugose corals, brachiopods, trilobite, gastropod ( Cyclonema), a sea star and coiled cephalopod. Jellies, small nautiloids & graptolites ( Orthograptus) are seen to the left.
What did invertebrates look like in the Ordovician era?
Most of the invertebrates had a calcitic skeleton, and even the sedimentary rocks of that time consisted of calcitic cement. Ordovician is the second period of the Paleozoic Era, and covered a time span of about 41.2 million years, from 485 million years ago to 443 million years ago.
What is the Ordovician radiation?
This unique period, known as the Ordovician radiation, unfolded over tens of millions of years and produced organisms that would dominate marine ecosystems for the remainder of the Paleozoic Era.
What percent of the Ordovician species became extinct?
An estimated 85 percent of all Ordovician species became extinct during the end-Ordovician extinction in the nearly two-million-year-long Hirnantian Age and the subsequent Rhuddanian Age of the Silurian Period. The diversity of marine animal families since late Precambrian time.