SILURIAN PERIOD


Meaning of SILURIAN PERIOD in English

Interval of geologic time, 443–417 million years ago.

The third period of the Paleozoic Era , the Silurian follows the Ordovician Period and precedes the Devonian . It marks the first appearance of land plants and jawed fishes. The continents were distributed as follows: Arctic Canada, Scandinavia, and Australia were probably in the tropics; Japan and the Philippines may have been inside the Arctic Circle; South America and Africa were likely near the South Pole, with either present-day Brazil or western Africa as the locus of the pole. The land surface was buried by an ice sheet, possibly as deep as that covering Antarctica today.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia.      Краткая энциклопедия Британика.