Tertiary Period

Eocene paleogeography

Tertiary Period, former official interval of geologic time lasting from approximately 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. It is the traditional name for the first of two periods in the Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago to the present); the second is the Quaternary Period (2.6 million years ago to the present). The Tertiary has five principal subdivisions, called epochs, which from oldest to youngest are the Paleocene (66 million to 55.8 million years ago), Eocene (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago), Oligocene (33.9 million to 23 million years ago), Miocene (23 million to 5.3 million years ago), and Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago).

Beginning in the late 20th century, a number of authorities preferred not to use the terms Tertiary and Quaternary, preferring instead to divide the time intervals encompassed by each into two different intervals known as the Paleogene Period (66 million to 23 million years ago) and the Neogene Period (which previously spanned the interval between 23 million years ago and the present). In 2005 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) decided to recommend keeping the Tertiary and Quaternary in their geologic time scale but only as sub-eras within the Cenozoic. The sub-era structure was abandoned by the ICS in 2008, and the Tertiary Period became officially replaced by the Paleogene and Neogene periods. (At present, the Neogene encompasses the interval between 23 million and 2.6 million years ago.)

geologic time

The Tertiary was an interval of enormous geologic, climatic, oceanographic, and biological change. It spanned the transition from a globally warm world containing relatively high sea levels and dominated by reptiles to a world of polar glaciation, sharply differentiated climate zones, and mammalian dominance. It began in the aftermath of the mass extinction event that occurred at the very end of the Cretaceous Period (the so-called K-T boundary), when as much as 80 percent of species, including the dinosaurs, disappeared. The Tertiary witnessed the dramatic evolutionary expansion of not only mammals but also flowering plants, insects, birds, corals, deep-sea organisms, marine plankton, and mollusks (especially clams and snails), among many other groups. The Tertiary Period saw huge alterations in Earth’s systems and the development of the ecological and climatic conditions that characterize the modern world. The end of the Tertiary is characterized by the growth of glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere and the emergence of primates that later gave rise to modern humans (Homo sapiens), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and other living great apes.

The name Tertiary was introduced by Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino in 1760. Arduino devised a stratigraphic system in which sedimentary rocks containing fossils were called “tertiary” rocks to distinguish them from igneous and metamorphic rocks present in the cores of mountain ranges (“primary” rocks), the shales and limestones of Europe (“secondary” rocks), and surficial gravel (“quaternary” rocks). Although by modern standards his system appears simplistic, it did provide the initial framework upon which modern stratigraphy is based.