Million years ago and compress it in more or less 30 minutes

Slide 3

Scientist have devised the Geologic Time Scale Chart. It is an important tool used to portray the history of
the Earth—a standard timeline used to determine the age of fossils and the events that formed them. As
what we can see in the chat, it has four major divisions, EONS, ERAS, PERIOD, AND EPOCHS. The
Precambrian covers almost 90% of the entire history of the Earth. Gamay lang ang details. Why? The
reason is simple. Precambrian history is not known in great enough detail. It a period of time extending
from about 4.6 billion years ago (at point at which Earth began to form.)

Slide 4

Paleozoic Era

In the Paleozoic Era, some 530 million years ago, an immense variety of invertebrate animals inhabited
Earth’s oceans. The most famous of invertebrates during that period was the trilobite, an armored
arthropod that scuttled around the seafloor for about 270 million years before going extinct. 

Slide 5

Their appearance is totally different from the structure of fish in our current era. For over 100 million
years, a parade of different kinds of fishes were the only vertebrates on Earth.

Slide 6

At the same time, some groups of plants and animals took a major step as they colonised the land for the
first time. We are not sure why this advance occurred, but it was probably the result of competition in the
marine ecosystems, plus the opportunity to escape predators and the availability of new terrestrial niches.

Spiders, centipedes and mites were among the earliest land animals.  Some of them were giants: the
largest was Slimonia, the size of a man and a relative of the scorpions.  ITS GOOD THAT THEY ARE
EXTINCT NOW!

Slide 7

Tiktaalik is technically a fish, complete with scales and gills – but it has the flattened head of a crocodile
and unusual fins. Tiktaalik half way between fish and the earliest four-legged land animals. 

What drove amphibian evolution?

It was originally believed that the tetrapods evolved during periods of drought, The animals would also
have been able to take advantage of terrestrial prey, such as arthropods.

Within 50 million years, the reptiles, better suited than amphibians to living out of water, replaced them as
the dominant land animal on Earth.

Slide 8

The history of life on Earth has been marked by periodic episodes of extinction, where the loss of species
outpaces the formation of new species. Particularly sharp declines in species diversity are called mass
extinctions. Five mass extinctions have occurred, and the most famous and well-studied extinction,
though not as drastic, occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period resulting in the demise of the
dinosaurs.

Despite of this events, the good thing nga nakita ko diri is referring to the term SPECIATION, wherein ,
where one species gives rise to a new and distinctly different species.

We are living during a new sixth mass extinction event. Some estimate that as many as one-fourth of all
species will become extinct in the near future.

Slide 9

The Mesozoic Era lasted about 180 million years, from about 245 million years ago to about 65 million
years ago. This era is best known as the time of the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs began in the Triassic, spread
during the Jurassic, and dominated Earth in the Cretaceous. They are so prominent that the Mesozoic is
also called "The Age of Reptiles." But dinosaurs are not the only life form around: birds and mammals
also appear during the Mesozoic, as well as deciduous trees and flowering plants.

Slide 10 indi gulpihanay ang ila pagkadula

Slide 11

Boundary between the cretaceous and tertiary period. In the fifth extinction, the birds and smaller
mammals survived and went on to occupy the aerial and terrestrial modes of living in the environment left
vacant by the dinosaurs. Crocodiles, small lizards, and turtles also survived.

Slide 12

During this era, plants and animals look most like those on Earth today.

Death of Mammoth

The vast majority of woolly mammoths died out at the end of the last ice age, about 10,500 years ago. But
because of rising sea levels, a population of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island and
continued living there until their demise about 3,700 years ago

Mutational meltdown/Genetic meltdown - is the accumulation of harmful mutations in a small population,

which leads to loss of fitness and decline of the population size

Slide 13

Slide 14

This figure shows a phylogeny of the vertebrates. About half of all vertebrates are fishes. The most
diverse and successful vertebrate group, they provided the evolutionary base for the invasion of land.

Slide 15

The first backboned animals were jawless fishes that appeared in the sea about 500 million years ago
(during the Paleozoic era). These fishes were members of a group called ostracoderms, meaning “shell-
skinned (these were fishes covered with an external skeleton or armor of bone.” One group of jawless
fishes, the agnathans, survives today as hagfish and parasitic lampreys.

Four important characteristics of fishes:

 Gills
 Vertebral column
 Single-loop blood circulation - Blood is pumped from the heart to the gills. From the gills, the
oxygenated blood passes to the rest of the body and then returns to the heart.
 Nutritional deficiencies - Fishes are unable to synthesize the aromatic amino acids and must
consume them in their diet. This inability has been inherited by all their vertebrate descendants.
SLIDE 16
Wriggling through the water, jawless and toothless, these fishes sucked up small food particles from
the ocean floor.
Extinct armored fishes called placoderms and spiny fishes called acanthodians both had jaws and
paired fins. For the last 250 million years, all jawed fishes swimming in the world’s oceans and rivers
have been either sharks (and their relatives, the rays) or bony fishes.

Slide 17
The problem of improving speed and maneuverability in swimming was solved in sharks by the
replacement of the heavy bony skeleton of the early fishes with a far lighter one made of strong,
flexible cartilage.
Instead of gaining speed through lightness, as sharks did, bony fishes adopted a heavy internal
skeleton made completely of bone. Bony fishes are still buoyant though because they possess a
swim bladder. The swim bladder is a gas-filled sac that allows fish to regulate their buoyant density
and so remain effortlessly suspended at any depth in the water.
Sharks use their large, oil-filled livers to provide buoyancy, yet most are still negatively buoyant and
thus must swim continually (thereby producing dynamic lift) to avoid sinking.

Slide 18
Slide 19

Amphibians likely evolved from the lobe-finned fishes, fish with paired fins that consist of a long, fleshy,
muscular lobe supported by a central core of bones that form fully articulated joints with one another.

1 In lobe-finned fish, the fins have a central core of bones (inside a fleshy lobe) in addition to bony rays.
Some lobe-finned fishes could move out onto land.

2 In the incomplete fossil of Tiktaalik (which did not contain the hindlimbs), the shoulder, forearm, and
wrist bones were like those of amphibians, but the end of the limb was like that of lobefinned fishes.
3 In primitive amphibians, the positions of the limb bones are shifted, and bony “toes” are present.

Characteristics of Amphibians
 Legs - four legs
 Lungs - a pair of lungs
 Cutaneous respiration
 Pulmonary veins - respiring directly across their skin, which is kept moist and
provides an extensive surface area
 Partially divided heart
Slide 21
All living reptiles share certain fundamental characteristics, features they retained from the time when
they replaced amphibians as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates:
 Amniotic egg - Amphibians never succeeded in becoming fully terrestrial because amphibian
eggs must be laid in water to avoid drying out. Most reptiles lay watertight eggs that offer various
layers of protection from drying out.
 Dry skin – prevent water loss
 Thoracic breathing - expanding and contracting the rib cage to suck air into the lungs and then
force it out

Slide 25
strong debate whether dinosaurs are the ancestor of birds or not

Slide 26
endothermy - can be defined as any mechanism of heat generation without shivering that increases
body temperature. Example: hair to provide insulation, the more efficient blood circulation provided
by a four-chambered heart, and more efficient breathing provided by the diaphragm

The duck-billed platypus and two species of echidna, or spiny anteater, are the only living monotremes.

Slide 27

Tertiary period – Cenozoic era