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.