Timeline of human history - Timeline 5: 260,000,000 BP to Present - Life since the Permian Extinction. Break-up of Pangea. Warm, wet climates. Dinosaurs, birds, flowering plants

Timeline of human history
version 2 - by Finn Sivert Nielsen

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Timeline 5 - 260,000,000 BP to Present
Life since the Permian Extinction. Break-up of Pangea. Warm, wet climates. Dinosaurs, birds, flowering plants

Following the hot desert conditions after the Permian Extinction, Pangea started breaking apart, the vast, shallow Tethys Sea arose and climates became moist and warm. We enter the age of the dinosaurs, which is also the age of the coevolution of flowering plants and bees, and of the evolution of avian dinosaurs into birds... And then - just as the fragments of Pangea start colliding again, forming modern mountain chains (Alps, Himalayas), closing the Tethys Sea, and slowly cooling and drying the climate - the Earth is hit out of the blue by a large (10-15 kilometers wide) meteor in the Caribbean, sending a tsunami of boiling water through the present-day US and on up into Canada and killing off some 70 percent of all species on Earth, among them the previously flourishing dinosaurs. Since this extinction, from a multitude of causes, we have (after an initial heat spike, perhaps a late result of the impact) seen a slow but sure cooling and drying of the Earth's climate, and the new species that take the place of those who were killed off by the meteor have evolved under these increasingly exacting conditions. Mammals seem to have flourished, and among mammals, primates in particular developed in unique ways.