Middle Devonian
Second epoch of the Devonian period
In the geological timescale, the Middle Devonian epoch (from 393.47 ± 0.99 million years ago to 382.31 ± 1.36 million years ago) occurred during the Devonian period, after the end of the Emsian age.
The Middle Devonian epoch is subdivided into two stages: Eifelian and Givetian.
01Life in the Middle Devonian
In the Middle Devonian the armored jawless fish known as ostracoderms were declining in diversity and instead the jawed fish were thriving and increasing in diversity in both the oceans and freshwater. The shallow, warm, oxygen-depleted waters of Devonian inland lakes, surrounded by primitive plants, provided the environment necessary for certain early fish to develop essential characteristics such as well developed lungs, ability to crawl out of the water and onto the land for short periods of time, possibly in search of food which would be developed by the tetrapods later in the Late Devonian which are descendents of these early fish.
The earliest forest grew in the Middle Devonian (Eifelian) time. This new environment was formed by cladoxylopsid trees including Calamophyton.
The Taghanic event took place near the end of the Middle Devonian.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Middle Devonian”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Mollweide Paleographic Map of Earth, 390 Ma (Eifelian Age).png by Scotese, Christopher R.; Vérard, Christian; Burgener, Landon; Elling, Reece P.; Kocsis, Ádám T., CC BY 4.0
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