Question 1

How do you say Ordovician?

Accepted Answer

Ordovician is pronounced or-doh-VISH-ee-un. Break it into four parts: OR, then DOH, then VISH, then ee-un. The stress falls on the third syllable, VISH, so that part gets said the loudest and strongest. Say it slowly a few times: or-doh-VISH-ee-un, and you will have it perfectly.

Question 2

What does Ordovician mean?

Accepted Answer

Ordovician is named after the Ordovices, an ancient Celtic tribe who lived in the hill country of what is now Wales during Roman times. British geologist Charles Lapworth coined the name in 1879 to settle a dispute between two rival geologists. The suffix -ian simply means belonging to or relating to that group. So Ordovician basically means relating to the land and time of the Ordovices.

Question 3

When did the Ordovician Period start and end?

Accepted Answer

The Ordovician Period began approximately 486.85 million years ago at the end of the Cambrian Period, and it ended about 443.1 million years ago when the Silurian Period began. That means it lasted roughly 43.75 million years in total. It is the second of the six periods that make up the Paleozoic Era.

Question 4

What animals lived during the Ordovician?

Accepted Answer

During the Ordovician almost all life lived in the ocean since the land was essentially bare rock. The seas were dominated by trilobites, enormous nautiloid cephalopods with shells up to 9 meters long, brachiopods, crinoids, early sea scorpions, and many types of primitive jawless fish. It was one of the most diverse marine ecosystems in Earth history thanks to an event scientists call the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.

Question 5

What ended the Ordovician Period?

Accepted Answer

The Ordovician ended with a catastrophic mass extinction around 443 million years ago that wiped out roughly 85 percent of all marine species. The extinction happened in two pulses: first a rapid ice age caused by the supercontinent Gondwana drifting over the South Pole, which dropped sea levels and destroyed shallow habitats, and then a second pulse when the ice melted and flooded the seafloor with cold oxygen-poor water. It is considered the second largest mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth.

Question 6

Were there dinosaurs in the Ordovician?

Accepted Answer

No, there were absolutely no dinosaurs during the Ordovician Period. Dinosaurs did not appear until roughly 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period, which came hundreds of millions of years after the Ordovician ended at 443 million years ago. During the Ordovician even land animals did not exist yet, and the first vertebrates were tiny jawless fish in the ocean. Dinosaurs are practically newcomers compared to the ancient creatures of the Ordovician seas.

Question 7

What did Ordovician Earth look like?

Accepted Answer

Ordovician Earth looked nothing like our planet today. A giant supercontinent called Gondwana sat near the South Pole while other landmasses drifted through tropical seas. The land was completely barren of large plants, just bare rock and sand swept by wind. Sea levels were much higher than today, flooding enormous shallow tropical oceans that teemed with bizarre armored sea creatures. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was many times higher than modern levels, making the climate extremely warm for most of the period.

Question 8

How long did the Ordovician Period last?

Accepted Answer

The Ordovician Period lasted approximately 43.75 million years, running from about 486.85 million years ago to 443.1 million years ago. To put that in perspective, that is more than ten times longer than the entire time that has passed since the dinosaurs went extinct. It is one of the longer periods in the Paleozoic Era and packed an enormous amount of evolutionary change into its timeline.

Question 9

What plants existed in the Ordovician?

Accepted Answer

Plant life on land during the Ordovician was extremely primitive, consisting of tiny spore-producing organisms similar to modern liverworts and mosses that appeared around 470 million years ago. These were not trees or bushes but microscopic flat green mats clinging to wet rocks near the water. Scientists know about them mainly from fossilized spores found in Ordovician rock layers around the world. True land plants with roots and leaves did not evolve until later periods.

Question 10

Who named the Ordovician Period?

Accepted Answer

The Ordovician Period was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lapworth in 1879. He invented the name specifically to resolve a famous decades-long argument between geologists Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison, who both claimed ownership of overlapping rock layers in Wales. Lapworth named the disputed rocks after the ancient Celtic Ordovices tribe of Wales, and the name was eventually formally adopted by the International Union of Geological Sciences in 1960.

Question 11

What came before and after the Ordovician?

Accepted Answer

The period before the Ordovician was the Cambrian Period, famous for the Cambrian Explosion of animal life, which ended around 486.85 million years ago. The period after the Ordovician was the Silurian Period, which began around 443.1 million years ago after the devastating end-Ordovician mass extinction. Both the Cambrian and Silurian, along with the Ordovician, are part of the larger Paleozoic Era, the age of ancient life.

Question 12

Was the Ordovician before or after the ice age?

Accepted Answer

The term ice age usually refers to events in the last few million years, but the Ordovician actually ended with its own severe ice age about 443 million years ago. This ancient glaciation was triggered when the supercontinent Gondwana drifted over the South Pole, and it was severe enough to cause one of the worst mass extinctions in Earth history. So the Ordovician came billions of years before the familiar ice ages that involved woolly mammoths, but it had its own freezing catastrophe at the very end.

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