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Take a closer look at the monsters we've investigated


	Era	Period/epoch	Million years ago	Big Dig Fossils / Significant events



		Holocene	0.01	Modern man

		Pleistocene	2	Mammoths Sabre tooths Early hominids

		Pliocene	5

		Miocene	25

		Oligocene	38

		Eocene	55

		Palaeocene	65



		Cretaceous	144	Mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous marks end of the 'Age of Reptiles' and the Mesozoic era Pterosaur Iguanadon Leedsichthys Titanosaur eggs

		Jurassic	213

		Triassic	248



		Permian	286	Mass extinction at the end of the Permian wipes out 90% of species and marks the end of the Palaeozoic era

		Carboniferous	360

		Devonian	408

		Silurian	438

		Ordovician	505

		Cambrian	590	Organisms with hard parts develop, so that the first common fossils begin to form about 550 million years ago

		Precambrian	More than 1,000	Earliest multi-cellular organisms

			3,850	Earliest single-celled organisms

			4,600	Earth formed

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