All of the major animal groups of the Ordovician oceans survived, including trilobites, "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.Judging from the past we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to distant futurity." (Charles Darwin) From primal swamp to speaking humans: Ernst Haeckel said (1903) that the Pithecoiden (monkey) theory of human evolution requires tracing our animal ancestors before monkeys.The end-Frasnian extinction (the largest) about 375 million years ago.The about 365 million years ago during the Famennian.

Mesoproterozoic from 1,600,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 years ago. Particular importance attaches to occurred around 1,300,000,000 years ago during the late Mesoproterzoic era, after the earth's transition to a more highly oxygenated atmosphere with an ozone screen. Deposits that made Westmorland Green slate formed around 450 million years ago. About 50 million years later, the material was altered by heat and pressure (metamorphosed) to slate, during mountain-building. After many more millions of years, they resembled patches of moss a few centimeters high.

They said "the epithet carboniferous is of obvious application to this series".

Henry Shaler Williams (1891) proposed Pennine System as the name for the Carboniferous.

The reference relates to Multicellular filaments from arctic Canada identified as a red algae Bangiomorpha pubescens. The curtain rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been going on for some time". London, Published by James Reynolds 174 Strand, 20t.10.1849. The first of these began about 443 million years ago.

"In all but detail, this fossil is indistinguishable from modern Bangia" for the Ediacaran fossils to first appear, 655,000,000 years ago. This showed life beginning with the Silurian system, which it described as "a marine deposit of vast extent containing abundance of marine organic remains. Together, these extinctions may have removed about 85 percent of species of marine animals.