13: Phanerozoic Eon - Mesozoic Era
- Page ID
- 33589
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The Mesozoic (“middle life”) Era started 252 million years ago after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event and ended 66 million years ago when another mass extinction event occurred. It is comprised of three periods: the Triassic Period, the Jurassic Period, and finally the Cretaceous Period.
Here is the the simplified geologic time scale used in the Geologic Time chapter of this book. The Mesozoic Era is highlighted in the middle.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The geological time scale. (Creative Commons License. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License; Edited. Original image by Jonathan R. Hendricks.)
As Pangea started to break apart during this era, North America's landscape continued to take shape. Mammals, birds, and flowering plants continued to develop however the main characters for this chapter in Earth's history are probably the dinosaurs. For this reason, the Mesozoic is known as the age of reptiles.
Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Sauropod Dinosaurs. Image from Богданов dmitrchel@mail.ru, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Perhaps the greatest fossil ever found, a velociraptor attacked a protoceratops, and both were fossilized mid sequence.