The Marine-Life Era on Urantia

59:0.1We reckon the his­tory of Uran­tia as be­gin­ning about one bil­lion years ago and ex­tend­ing through five ma­jor eras:

59:0.21. The pre­life era ex­tends over the ini­tial four hun­dred and fifty mil­lion years, from about the time the planet at­tained its pres­ent size to the time of life es­tab­lish­ment. Your stu­dents have des­ig­nated this pe­riod as the Archeo­zoic.

59:0.32. The life-dawn era ex­tends over the next one hun­dred and fifty mil­lion years. This epoch in­ter­venes be­tween the pre­ced­ing pre­life or cat­a­clysmic age and the fol­low­ing pe­riod of more highly de­vel­oped ma­rine life. This era is known to your re­searchers as the Pro­tero­zoic.

59:0.43. The ma­rine-life era cov­ers the next two hun­dred and fifty mil­lion years and is best known to you as the Pa­le­o­zoic.

59:0.54. The early land-life era ex­tends over the next one hun­dred mil­lion years and is known as the Meso­zoic.

59:0.65. The mam­malian era oc­cu­pies the last fifty mil­lion years. This re­cent-times era is known as the Ceno­zoic.

59:0.7The ma­rine-life era thus cov­ers about one quar­ter of your plan­e­tary his­tory. It may be sub­di­vided into six long pe­ri­ods, each char­ac­ter­ized by cer­tain well-de­fined de­vel­op­ments in both the ge­o­logic realms and the bi­o­logic do­mains.

59:0.8As this era be­gins, the sea bot­toms, the ex­ten­sive con­ti­nen­tal shelves, and the nu­mer­ous shal­low near-shore basins are cov­ered with pro­lific veg­e­ta­tion. The more sim­ple and prim­i­tive forms of an­i­mal life have al­ready de­vel­oped from pre­ced­ing veg­etable or­gan­isms, and the early an­i­mal or­gan­isms have grad­u­ally made their way along the ex­ten­sive coast lines of the var­i­ous land masses un­til the many in­land seas are teem­ing with prim­i­tive ma­rine life. Since so few of these early or­gan­isms had shells, not many have been pre­served as fos­sils. Nev­er­the­less the stage is set for the open­ing chap­ters of that great “stone book” of the life-rec­ord preser­va­tion which was so me­thod­i­cally laid down dur­ing the suc­ceed­ing ages.

59:0.9The con­ti­nent of North Amer­ica is won­der­fully rich in the fos­sil-bear­ing de­posits of the en­tire ma­rine-life era. The very first and old­est lay­ers are sep­a­rated from the later strata of the pre­ced­ing pe­riod by ex­ten­sive ero­sion de­posits which clearly seg­re­gate these two stages of plan­e­tary de­vel­op­ment.