The name is a combination of the Ancient Greek palæo- meaning “old” and the Eocene Epoch. The epoch is bracketed by two major events in Earth’s history. The K–Pg extinction event killed off 75% of living species, most famously the non-avian dinosaurs. The end of the epoch was marked by the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum.
About Paleocene in brief
The Paleocene is the first epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era. The name is a combination of the Ancient Greek palæo- meaning “old” and the Eocene Epoch. The epoch is bracketed by two major events in Earth’s history. The K–Pg extinction event killed off 75% of living species, most famously the non-avian dinosaurs. The end of the epoch was marked by the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum, which was a major climatic event wherein about 2,500–4,500 gigatons of carbon were released into the atmosphere and ocean systems. The word “Paleocene” was first used by French paleobotanist and geologist Wilhelm Philipp Schimper in 1874 while describing deposits near Paris. The term is derived from Ancient Greek eo—eos—cain and the word “Eocene” meaning “the old part of” or “recent” in the broad usage of the word so did not come into common usage until the 20th century. It is the name of a geological epoch that lasted from about 66 to 56 million years ago. It was preceded by the Mesozoic, and followed by the Tertiary and Quaternary periods. The Paleocene saw the dawn of modern, or modern, life on Earth, with forests worldwide, but they had low species richness in regards to plant life. Mammals proliferated, and the earliest placental and marsupial mammals are recorded from this time, but most Paleocene taxa have ambiguous affinities. In the seas, ray-finned fish rose to dominate open ocean and reef ecosystems.
The Earth had a greenhouse climate without permanent ice sheets at the poles, like the preceding MesozoIC. The continents of the Northern Hemisphere were still connected via some land bridges; and South America, Antarctica, and Australia had not completely separated yet. The Rocky Mountains were being uplifted, the Americas had not yet joined, the Indian Plate had begun its collision with Asia. The North Atlantic Igneous Province was forming in the third-largest magmatic event of the last 150 million years. In 1978, the Paleogenes were officially defined as the. Paleocene, Eocene, and Oligocene epochs; and the Neogene as the Miocene and Pliocene. In 1989, Tertiaries were removed from the boundaries due to the arbitrary nature of their boundary, but Quaternaries were reinstated to the reinstatement in the reinertiary in the 2009 re-statement of the Taternary. In 2009, the Quaternarians were removed due to their time scale, which may lead to a change in the boundaries of the time scale of time on the Earth’s geological history. In the oceans, the thermohaline circulation probably was much different than it is today, with downwellings occurring in the North Pacific rather than the North Atlantic, and water density mainly being controlled by salinity rather than temperature.
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This page is based on the article Paleocene published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
