Evolution · 1981 · 186 citations · 0 references
Some 405 million years ago multicellular plants and animals began a slow colonization of the continents. First traces are in the shallow waters of the Late Silurian, followed by rapidly increasing records of plants during the Devonian and invertebrates and vertebrates from the late Devonian and Carboniferous. Much of the earliest history of both the animals and plants remains obscure, but in the 19th and 20th centuries, during which speculation and accumulation of data has gone on apace, substantive data have been accumulated and ways of looking at the problems have changed immensely. An older way of looking at evolution during the later Paleozoic through a group-by-group analysis has partially given way to coordinated studies of associations of organisms in community systems and considerations of the ecology and taphonomy of their occurrences.