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Phanerozoic

Phanerozoic

Adapted from Wikipedia · Explorer experience

Illustrations of plants and animals from different periods of Earth's history, showing how life has changed over millions of years.

The Phanerozoic is the time when plants and animals became common on our planet. It started about 539 million years ago and is still going on today. This is the time when many creatures, like fish, bugs, and plants, began to live on land and in the oceans.

During the Phanerozoic, Earth’s land changed too. All the land once came together into one big continent called Pangaea. Later, it broke apart into the continents we know today, like Africa, Asia, and South America.

The Phanerozoic is split into three big parts called eras: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. In the Paleozoic, the first fish and animals that could live on land appeared. The Mesozoic is famous for dinosaurs, and the Cenozoic is when many new birds and mammals, including humans, evolved.

Scientists chose the name Phanerozoic because it means “visible life.” They picked this name because, during this time, many animals developed hard shells. These shells often became fossils, which are like nature’s way of preserving ancient life as stones we can find today.

Images

A timeline showing the evolution of animals and plants throughout Earth's history.
A fossil trilobite from the Silurian period, showcasing ancient marine life from New York.
A digital illustration of an ostracoderm, an early armored fish from Earth's ancient past.
An artist's reconstruction of Proterogyrinus, an ancient prehistoric creature from West Virginia's Paleozoic era.
A 3D model reconstruction of Dimetrodon grandis, an ancient prehistoric creature, shown with its scaly skin and upright posture based on scientific evidence.
A scientific illustration of Sellosaurus gracilis, a prosauropod dinosaur from the Late Triassic period of Europe.
An artistic reconstruction of Sericipterus, a flying reptile from the time of the dinosaurs.
An artist’s illustration of a Stegosaurus, showing its bony plates and tail spikes, as imagined by a paleontologist.
A scientific illustration of Tylosaurus proriger, an ancient marine reptile, based on the latest research about its body structure.
An artist's reconstruction of Basilosaurus cetoides, an ancient marine reptile from the time of the dinosaurs.
An artistic reconstruction of a Pleistocene landscape in northern Spain featuring woolly mammoths, cave lions, and other prehistoric animals.
A map showing the world as it looked 500 million years ago during the late Cambrian period.
Map showing how the world's continents have moved over time
A diagram showing the layers of rock in the Williston Basin, helping us learn about Earth's history.

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Phanerozoic, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Images from Wikimedia Commons. Tap any image to view credits and license.