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Pliocene Time Period
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Pliocene Time Period
Emerson Atwood
What did it look like?
When it happened
It happened nearly 5.3 million years ago and ended 2.6 million years ago. It happened during the Tertiary period and during the Cenozoic Era. It was between the Pleistocene and the Miocene Epoch/Age.
When did it happen?
What it looked like.
It was cooler and drier,and seasonal,and similar to the modern climates... The global cooling that occurred during the Pliocene may have spurred on the disappearance of forests and the spread of grasslands and savannas.
The World
Picture to prove
Animals
Mid-Pliocene, around 3.5 million years ago, allowing a number of terrestrial mammals including ground sloths, glyptodonts (large, armadillo-like, armoured animals), armadillos, opossums, and porcupines to appear in the Late Pliocene fossil record of North America. (Previously, they had been isolated on the South American continent.)Mastodons (elephant-like animals) underwent a great evolutionary diversification during the Pliocene, and many variant forms developed, adapted to varying ecological environments. In North America, rhinoceroses became extinct. Camels, some of large size, were abundant and diverse, as were horses.
What life forms existed then
What did early humans look like?
Humans
PLIOCENE HOMININS
Foraging paranthropines in South African grasslands. ... The Pliocene Epoch can be considered the time of the great adaptive radiation of the hominins, when more than a dozen species evolved in the hominin corridor from Ethiopia to South Africa. So clearly humans aren't very well around yet. They were still in the very early stages of life so there's not a lot on them.
What plants were around?
Plants
Among the common plant life were pines, mosses, oaks and grasses. Flowering plants and edible crops dominate the landscape in the later part of this era as humans cultivate the land. There wasn't a lot on this.
This is what happened.......
What happened during this time period?
During the Pliocene Epoch,the continents moved around a lot. This formed several mountain ranges and joined North America and South America together through the Isthmus of Panama. There were dry grasslands and many grazing animals that flourished, while other species died out. Also large polar ice caps started to develop and Antarctica became the frozen continent that it is today. It is uncertain what caused this climate cooling during the Pliocene.
The Continents are moving
The Continents
For example, every year, North America moves about 1 inch further away from Europe. That's about half the length of your thumb, so you don't notice it normally. But over millions of years, even very slow movement adds up.
That's exactly what you would find during the Pliocene Epoch. The Pliocene Epoch lasted from 5.3 million years ago to 2.6 million years ago - that's 2.7 million years total! The moving continents during the Pliocene Epoch changed the ways that plants and animals could live on Earth. For example, can you guess which continent didn't have any cats until the Pliocene Epoch?
The answer is North America did not have cats OR dogs until the Pliocene Era!!!
The Answer
The connection between North and South America had a significant impact on flora and fauna in two respects: (1) On land, the creation of a land bridge enabled species to migrate between the two continents. This led to a migration of armadillo, ground sloth, opposum, and porcupines from South to North America and an invasion of dogs, cats, bears and horses in the opposite direction. (2) The joining of the two tectonic plates also led to changes in the marine environment. An environment with species that had been interacting for billions of years now became separated into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This in turn had a significant impact on the evolution of the species which became isolated from each other.
Major Events
What are some major events that happened?
Approximately 2.6 million years ago (Pliocene epoch), a tsunami of cosmic energy from a massive supernova or a series of them about 150 light-years away reached Earth and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering the mass extinction of large marine animals, according to University of Kansas. Some large and fierce marine animals inhabiting shallower waters may have been doomed by the supernova radiation.”
Credits goes to...
1.https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/tertiary/pliocene.php
2.https://www.britannica.com/science/Pliocene-Epoch
3.https://study.com/academy/lesson/pliocene-epoch-facts-lesson-for-kids.html
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/supernova-explosions-end-pliocene-marine-mass-extinction-06716.html