Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: The Later half of the Paleozoic Era: Life On Land

 This post begins with the Permian-Triassic Extinction circa 252,000,000 years ago.  And it ends around the start of the Devonian Period backward to about 445,000,000 years ago.  It was a time after millions of years of large shallow oceans incubating new life forms and the first terrestrial life.  Most of the images I have are from the dioramas, so that's where we begin.

LIFE BEFORE BIG HERBIVORES

A lone Demetrodon seeks prey on the muddy edge of a shallow sea.

There's life in the sea.  

And keeping it's own company up among the ferns is a large, lumbering Dicynodont, perhaps a Lystrosaurus.  The coming Permian-Triassic Extinction will take all the Demetrodons and their vegetarian cousins the Edaphosauri, but the humble Dicynodonts will survive and thrive for the first couple of millions years of the Era.

CONIFER FORRESTS AND FERN PRAIRIES

A pair of industrious large lizards have begun to display bipodal abilities, if just for a moment, and when excited by potential prey.  

We only have to look up to the top of this dead conifer tree trunk to see the creature who is decidedly opposed to their invitation to dine!

Crocodilians have joined the evolutionary tree of life.

As have smaller lizards who are turning their ability to glide into rudimentary flight.

And while many of the life forms remind us of species we know today, these amphibians are members of a long extinct clan known as Cacops.

TROPICS DRY AS ICE SHEETS RETREAT & SWAMPS SPREAD AS ICE SHEETS INCREASE

Several million years of rapid climate changes illustrate the nature of life to adapt.  A series of mini-Ice Ages help define the process.

As the ice sheet melts, it becomes covered by a thick layer of ground rock, sand and dust.

Soon new resilient confer forests establish themselves in the open plains.

These swamps will one day become the ribbons of coal that jut across the earth and continue to fuel economic expansion even as they also bear ominous pressures to our modern climate.

There the "turtle" becomes a dragon fly--in some ways this was the Age of the Insect.

One of the Hallmark displays features a trip into a mock mine which surrounds the visited in the heart of a vein of coal full of fossil remnants from these primordeal swamps.

Nearby are actual fossilized plants from a coal mine.

The last pic from this section is that of the skellaton of one of those early Cacopian quadropedal animals, the first non-insect able to raise it's belly up off of the ground.