Life on our planet developed millions of years ago, but if large life-forms are taken into consideration, then intelligent organisms like the Homo sapiens have never dominated any specific era or even a period. The Cenozoic Era can be known as the arrival and dominance of intelligent life-forms like modern human beings, which changed the world scenario permanently.
The term ‘Cenozoic’ has been derived from the Greek words: kainos meaning ‘new’ and zoe meaning ‘life’. It is the shortest era of the Earth, spanning from about 66 million years ago to the present. After the sudden K-T boundary mass extinction, mammals got a chance to evolve extensively in this era, and hence, it is also called ‘The Age of The Mammals’. The climate of our planet stabilized and atmospheric oxygen slowly increases with a simultaneous decrease in carbon dioxide and other toxic gaseous elements.
Earlier, the Cenozoic comprised two periods: Tertiary and Quaternary, the former being divided into Paleogene and Neogene, but now the term Tertiary is slowly phased out. Instead, the era is now divided into three periods: Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary, ranging from the oldest to the youngest. They are again subdivided into a number of stages/epochs. Apart from mammals, the Aves class of Chordates, i.e., the birds also evolved a lot, and several of them were larger than the average height of a human.
Credit: science.earthjay.com
Picture Credit : Google
