Silurian

By the Silurian, the fist land plants to grow in the Ordovician had now taken on the more familiar form around us all today. They began to grow upright, and develop primitive branches, maximising the sunlight they could absorb. These revolutionary plants are the ancestors of trees, bushes, shrubs, flowers, even the weeds in your garden. In-fact any plant that grows upwards and has side shoots and leaves are all related to the plants of the Silurian. Meanwhile, the global temperature began to rise again, but the oxygen was too low, and the carbon dioxide too high for us to survive. The first land animals evolved here, not our ancestors though, we were still fish 439 million years ago, but it was the arthropods who colonised the land. The ancestors of spiders and scorpions had primitive lungs, to enable them to absorb the little oxygen present. The Silurian scorpions were not the small things you may see in the desert, they were over a metre in length, with about a 10cm sting to mach. Very painful, especially as the prayed on our ancestors.

Click here to see our Silurian fossils.

←Palaeozoic era

Devonian period→

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