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Introduction

A map of Earth as it appeared 390 million years ago during the Middle Devonian Epoch

The Devonian (/dəˈvoʊni.ən, dɛ-/ də-VOH-nee-ən, deh-) is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic era during the Phanerozoic eon, spanning 60.3 million years from the end of the preceding Silurian period at 419.2 million years ago (Ma), to the beginning of the succeeding Carboniferous period at 358.9 Ma. It is the fourth period of both the Paleozoic and the Phanerozoic. It is named after Devon, South West England, where rocks from this period were first studied.

The first significant evolutionary radiation of life on land occurred during the Devonian, as free-sporing land plants (pteridophytes) began to spread across dry land, forming extensive coal forests which covered the continents. By the middle of the Devonian, several groups of vascular plants had evolved leaves and true roots, and by the end of the period the first seed-bearing plants (pteridospermatophytes) appeared. This rapid evolution and colonization process, which had begun during the Silurian, is known as the Silurian-Devonian Terrestrial Revolution. The earliest land animals, predominantly arthropods such as myriapods, arachnids and hexapods, also became well-established early in this period, after beginning their colonization of land at least from the Ordovician period. (Full article...)

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Selected article on the Devonian world and its legacies

The subphylum (or phylum) Chelicerata constitutes one of the major subdivisions of the phylum (or superphylum) Arthropoda, and includes horseshoe crabs, scorpions, spiders, mites, harvestmen, ticks, and Solifugae. Like all arthropods, chelicerates have segmented bodies with jointed limbs, all covered in a cuticle made of chitin and proteins. The chelicerate bauplan consists of two tagmata, the cephalothorax and the abdomen. The group is named for their chelicerae, appendages near the mouth generally used to feed. The group has the open circulatory system typical of arthropods, in which a tube-like heart pumps blood through the hemocoel, which is the major body cavity.

Chelicerates were originally predators, but the group has diversified to use all the major feeding strategies. The guts of most modern chelicerates are too narrow for solid food, and they generally liquidize their food by grinding it with their chelicerae and pedipalps and flooding it with digestive enzymes. Most lay eggs that hatch as what look like miniature adults. In most chelicerate species the young have to fend for themselves, but in scorpions and some species of spider the females protect and feed their young.

The chelicerata originated as marine animals, possibly in the Cambrian period, but the first confirmed chelicerate fossils, eurypterids, date from 445 million years ago in the Late Ordovician period. The surviving marine species include the four species of xiphosurans (horseshoe crabs), and possibly the 1,300 species of pycnogonids (sea spiders), if the latter are chelicerates. (see more...)

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Did you know?

Restoration of Hastocularis argus.

... that four-eyed harvestmen known as Tetrophthalmi once roamed the Earth?
...that eighty years on, scientists are still debating whether the Palæozoic fossils known as Chitinozoans (SEM image pictured) represent plants, animals or eggs?
... that an anomalocaridid, a bizarre Cambrian organism, has been found 100 million years later, in the Devonian era?
... that the extinct Gigantoproductus giganteus was the largest known species of brachiopod?
... that fossils of the extinct bivalve family Praenuculidae have been found on every continent except Antarctica?

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Sawdonia ornata. Collected from the Lower Devonian Battery Point formation (Emsian stage of Quebec), from cliffs between D'algvillon and seql rock, by Dianne Edwards.
Photo credit: Verisimilus

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Selected article on the Devonian in human science, culture and economics

Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, a new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science challenged traditional essentialism. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of paleontology with the concept of extinction further undermined the static view of nature. In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first fully formed theory of evolution.

In 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a new evolutionary theory that was explained in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Unlike Lamarck, Darwin proposedcommon descent and a branching tree of life. The theory was based on the idea of natural selection, and it synthesized a broad range of evidence from animal husbandry, biogeography, geology, morphology, and embryology.

The debate over Darwin's work led to the rapid acceptance of the general concept of evolution, but the specific mechanism he proposed, natural selection, was not widely accepted until it was revived by developments in biology that occurred during the 1920s through the 1940s. Before that time most biologists argued that other factors were responsible for evolution. The synthesis of natural selection with Mendelian genetics during the 1920s and 1930s founded the new discipline of population genetics. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, population genetics became integrated with other biological fields, resulting in a widely applicable theory of evolution that encompassed much of biology—the modern evolutionary synthesis. (see more...)

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