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Big Monster Dig

Home | Programmes | The team | What Fossils Tell Us | Collecting Fossils | Glossary | Timeline

Timeline

	Era		Period/epoch		Million years ago		Big Dig Fossils / Significant events
	Cenezoic		Holocene		0.01		Modern man
			Pleistocene		2		Mammoths Sabre tooths Early hominids
			Pliocene		5
			Miocene		25
			Oligocene		38
			Eocene		55
			Palaeocene		65
	Mesozoic		Cretaceous		144		Mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous marks end of the 'Age of Reptiles' and the Mesozoic era Pterosaur Iguanadon Wealden dinosaurs Leedsichthys Titanosaur eggs
			Jurassic		213
			Triassic		248
	Palaeozoic		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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