3120: Geologic Periods

Geologic Periods

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Title text: Geologists claim it's because the earlier Cenozoic used to be called the Tertiary, but that's just a ruse to hide the secret third geologic period, between the Neogene and the Quaternary, that they won't tell us about.

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created by a Cretaceous raptor. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Period	Dates (millions of years ago)	My Favorite Part	My Biggest Complaint	Explanation
Precambrian	4500-539	Life develops	Snowball Earth episodes	The Precambrian (italicized in the comic since it's not a geologic period) is the first 88% of Earth's history, including the time 4.1 to 3.4 billion years ago when life on Earth began. The Snowball Earth hypothesis says that during some time spans in the past, Earth became nearly or entirely frozen, with no liquid water on the surface. It's related to the idea of the icehouse Earth, times when the planet fluctuates between glacial and interglacial periods (such as now).
Cambrian	539-487	Trilobites!	Evolution could stand to calm down a little	The Cambrian explosion was a sudden radiation of complex life forms when nearly all important animal phyla, or precursors to them, appeared.
Ordovician	487-443	Earth might have had rings	Scary volcanic eruption in North America
Silurian	443-420	First land animals	Earth's newfound mold problem
Devonian	420-359	Big mountains in Boston	Yeah, sure, what those giant killer fish needed was armor
Carboniferous	359-299	Cool forests	Bugs too big	The 'bugs' in this period included the largest-ever known land invertebrate, a 2.6-m (8.5-ft) millipede-like animal; the largest-ever known flying insect, resembling a dragonfly with a wingspan of ~75 cm (30 in); and a 70 cm (2 ft 4 in) scorpion.
Permian	299-252	Pangea	Google "The Great Dying"	Pangaea was the most recent supercontinent containing nearly all of Earth's landmass. The Great Dying, more formally known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, occurred at the end of the Permian and is the most severe of Earth's 'Big Five' mass extinction events. In it, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species were wiped out.
Triassic	252-201	Tanystropheus	Damage to Canada still visible from space at Manicouagan	Tanystropheus was a verrrry long-necked dinosaur. Manicouagan Reservoir is a ring-shaped lake, the remains of the crater caused by a 5-km (3-mi) asteroid hitting Quebec.
Jurassic	201-143	Birds	Parasitoid wasps
Cretaceous	143-66	Raptors	Raptors	Raptors
Paleogene	66-23	Pretty horseys!!!	Paleocene-eocene thermal maximum	The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum was a time where the global average temperature rose by around 5-8 °C is a relatively short period of time.
Neogene	23-2.6	Forests of Dracaena dragonblood trees	Zanclean flood	The Zanclean flood is theorized to be the flood that refilled the Mediterranean Sea.
Quaternary	2.6-present	Burrito invented	Whoever picked the name for the third period of the Cenozoic

Transcript

This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

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Discussion

Discovered this explanation fresh off the griddle. The transcript doesn't even exist yet wow. Also, hi! This is my first time commenting! Did I do it right? Giraffequeries (talk) 22:54, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

(Yes, looks like you did.)

A couple of hours on, and nobody's attempted the Transcript yet. If you're still around right now-ish and you've got more time than everyone elses seems to have (including me, sorry), that could be your next thing.

Check prior Transcripts for the right kind of way (and a few wrongs, but hey?), and imagine the words+'markup' being read through the hypothetical screen-readers. That might not know how to 'audible' a table, may at best shout/stress bold-strong/italics-emphasis, but perhaps not correctly.

But just getting the words down helps the next soul with a few more minutes at hand. Any normal weekend, I'd be happy to do it right now, but I've got to be up in five hours, and I mildly regret just checking right now to see if I might have missed the latest comic popping up when it was a bit earlier and I was prepping my weekend bags. :) 82.132.236.123 01:49, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Darn, forgot to say my intended actual personal comment I was just going to add. i.e.: Looks like Randall hasn't forgotten about Raptors! Anyway, goodnight/early-morning (my time).... 82.132.236.123 01:53, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

I've done my part. Also, Raptors TPS (talk) 02:20, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Did anyone else google "The Great Dying"? How about "Manicouagan"? How about "Picture of a dinosaur eating a burrito" (just to prove Randall wrong)?

Ask and you shall receive (shitty AI pic made in five seconds): https://imgur.com/a/4lVKoqD 2A02:2455:1960:4000:1972:32FB:7958:52D3 18:30, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Who wrote this? Tanystropheus wasn't a dinosaur! 70.115.234.146 03:28, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Given that this wiki doesn't really like tables, and this one is formatted rather simply, maybe we should just transfer its content to the transcript and retain only explanations in the main part, as separate paragraphs? The Rooster (talk) 08:41, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

What are you talking about. This wiki loves tables! And it is used extensively. --Kynde (talk) 09:07, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I'm not sure what to do for transcript, comic 2627 is in similar style but not sure if we necessarily want it like that.--Darth Vader (talk) 09:18, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Just a small explanation to the Quarternary/Tertiary naming issue because this has become rather obscure and is seldomly spelled out in newer geology textbooks: When the first geologists came up with a table of geologic epochs it consisted of four parts: "Primary", "Secondary", "Tertiary" and "Quarternary". Only the last two names have survived into our time, because the first two parts became split up into the systems that we still use today rather quickly. This is also the main reason that most stratigraphers want to get rid of the terms Tertiary and Quarternary and why Paleogene/Neogene were invented instead. 2003:DD:472A:5500:35F8:1CD8:D274:E286 14:46, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Burrito? Surely not, everyone knows its "soft toilet tissue" 2A00:23C8:252D:A301:B573:A9F2:E80C:711B 10:08, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't know why he doesn't like the Zanclean flood. It would have been a spectacular sight had anyone been around to see it.2A02:8388:1701:E100:60D1:5BC3:D420:5528 16:44, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Should the explanation of the Zanclean flood have some sort of reference to 1190: Time? Morgan Wick (talk) 00:38, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

That would be obvious and could explain his dislike mentioned above. Lots of animals would have died during this event. --Kynde (talk) 09:07, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

I have deleted my previous comment, as it was in response to text in the Explanation that no longer exists. These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 03:00, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

Randall is wrong - parisitoid wasps are very cool. 82.13.184.33 08:14, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

The Quaternary is obviously so called because it's the period of Quatermass. 82.13.184.33 09:46, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

If y'all disagree with my docutainment interpretation, feel free to erase it again of course, but the common denominator in Randall's table here really is each period's entertainment value as a focal point. Also, I'd like to add that it's not a bad thing at all for a documentary to be entertaining; quite the opposite. For example, I might never have studied geography if it wasn't for films about interesting foreign places and cool-looking books about volcanoes and dinosaurs and weather, all of which I devoured in my childhood. PaulEberhardt (talk) 20:54, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Whatever the inspiration, Randall has been using the table as a comic device for a powerful long time, see the category Charts on this wiki, and i.a. the comics 181: Interblag (20061108) and 394: Kilobyte (20080310). 2605:59C8:160:DB08:8552:7338:3C0A:5AFC 06:34, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

And thus Velociraptors return after (according to the velociraptor category) 12 years of silence, all hail the great Deinonychus! Xkcdjerry (talk) 12:13, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

Isn't the Quaternary also called "Anthropocene"? It's a really anthropocentric name, but the definition of the period is "since the advent of man". You can't get more anthropocentric than the Quaternary, or Anthropocene! -- 2a04:cec0:1207:653f:1ce3:a4ff:feb2:a5fe (talk) 16:31, 22 August 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The Quaternary is a geologic period, from 2.58 million years ago to the present. The Anthropocene has been proposed (but never yet officially adopted) as an epoch being from various points 'post-Holocene' (an epoch that started after the start of the greater quaternary period), the change-over being as late as the Trinity nuclear test (as the moment at which technogenic radionuclides started to be added to the environment). We are currently in the quaternary period and the subordinate epoch of your choice. Either still the holocene, or maybe at some point (best left to be argued with far more hindsight, presuming anyone cares to) we entered the anthropocene...

Or, by the time anyone can be sure, they will be far more sure that every anthropocentric idea of dividing up geologic time is critically wrong and there's a much better alternative method of dividing it all up, with completely different names. ;) 20:44, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure how widespread this is, but in older Czech literature at least, "Primary" is used to refer to the Paleozoic (Cambrian → Permian), "Secondary" to the Mesozoic (Triassic → Cretaceous), "Tertiary" to Paleogene and Neogene (Paleocene → Pliocene), "Quaternary" to, well, the Quaternary period (Pleistocene → Holocene). 31.30.164.107 21:45, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
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