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The Ordovician Portal

Introduction

The Ordovician (/ɔːrdəˈvɪʃi.ən, -doʊ-, -ˈvɪʃən/ or-də-VISH-ee-ən, -⁠doh-, -⁠VISH-ən) is a geologic period and system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years from the end of the Cambrian Period 485.4 Ma (million years ago) to the start of the Silurian Period 443.8 Ma.

The Ordovician, named after the Welsh tribe of the Ordovices, was defined by Charles Lapworth in 1879 to resolve a dispute between followers of Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison, who were placing the same rock beds in North Wales in the Cambrian and Silurian systems, respectively. Lapworth recognized that the fossil fauna in the disputed strata were different from those of either the Cambrian or the Silurian systems, and placed them in a system of their own. The Ordovician received international approval in 1960 (forty years after Lapworth's death), when it was adopted as an official period of the Paleozoic Era by the International Geological Congress.

Life continued to flourish during the Ordovician as it did in the earlier Cambrian Period, although the end of the period was marked by the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events. Invertebrates, namely molluscs and arthropods, dominated the oceans, with members of the latter group probably starting their establishment on land during this time, becoming fully established by the Devonian. The first land plants are known from this period. The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event considerably increased the diversity of life. Fish, the world's first true vertebrates, continued to evolve, and those with jaws may have first appeared late in the period. About 100 times as many meteorites struck the Earth per year during the Ordovician compared with today. (Full article...)

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Bacteria (/bækˈtɪəriə/ ; singular: bacterium) constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a number of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals. Bacteria were among the first life forms to appear on Earth, and are present in mosthabitats on the planet. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, and the deep portions of Earth's crust. Bacteria also live in plants and animals and have flourished in manned space vehicles.

There are approximately 5×10³⁰ bacteria on Earth, forming a biomass that exceeds that of all plants and animals. Bacteria are vital in recycling nutrients, with many steps in nutrient cycles depending on these organisms, such as the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere and putrefaction. In the biological communities surrounding hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, bacteria provide the nutrients needed to sustain life by converting dissolved compounds such as hydrogen sulphide and methane to energy. Most bacteria have not been characterised, and only about half of the phyla of bacteria have species that can be grown in the laboratory. The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and rarely harbour membrane-bound organelles. (see more...)

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Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, a new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science challenged traditional essentialism. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of paleontology with the concept of extinction further undermined the static view of nature. In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first fully formed theory of evolution.

In 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a new evolutionary theory that was explained in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Unlike Lamarck, Darwin proposedcommon descent and a branching tree of life. The theory was based on the idea of natural selection, and it synthesized a broad range of evidence from animal husbandry, biogeography, geology, morphology, and embryology.

The debate over Darwin's work led to the rapid acceptance of the general concept of evolution, but the specific mechanism he proposed, natural selection, was not widely accepted until it was revived by developments in biology that occurred during the 1920s through the 1940s. Before that time most biologists argued that other factors were responsible for evolution. The synthesis of natural selection with Mendelian genetics during the 1920s and 1930s founded the new discipline of population genetics. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, population genetics became integrated with other biological fields, resulting in a widely applicable theory of evolution that encompassed much of biology—the modern evolutionary synthesis. (see more...)

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Fossil Sinoceras species from China.
Photo credit: Tania Christopher and Isabelle Luna

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Did you know?

...that fossil Thelodont fish (depiction pictured) surprised scientists by showing that stomachs evolved before jaws?
... that Aegirocassis is the earliest example of massive filter-feeder animals discovered?
... that members of the extinct bivalve genus Hemiconcavodonta are unique in the subfamily Concavodontinae in that their teeth point in two directions?
... that the extinct Argentinian bivalve Cuyopsis symmetricus was named for the symmetry of its rectangular shells?
... that the extinct bivalve subfamily Praenuculinae can be told apart from its sister subfamily by looking at teeth?