In the Carboniferous period (another name is carbon), most of the land was two huge continents: Gondwana and Laurasia. In the early period, the climate was almost everywhere tropical or subtropical. Huge areas were occupied by shallow seas. Vast low-lying coastal plains constantly flooded and swamps formed there.
Trees from tree ferns quickly spread in this humid and hot climate. Such forests began to emit a mass of oxygen, and soon the content of this gas in the atmosphere reached its current level. Some trees reached a height of forty-five meters. Plants rushed up so fast that the invertebrate animals that lived in the soil did not have time to eat on time and then decompose them. As a result of vegetation became more and more.
It is in the Carboniferous period that peat deposits begin to form. In swamps, they quickly went under water, forming the main coal deposits. Thanks to carbon, people can mine coal and produce various substances from it (for example, coal tar).
In the coal swamp there were dense thickets of horsetails and calamites, a large number of huge trees (including plunders and sigillaria). Such conditions were an ideal habitat for the first amphibians - crinodon and ichthyostegs, for arthropods (spiders, cockroaches, dragonflies, mega-neuvers).
At that time, land was mastered not only by plants, but also by other organisms. First of all, these are arthropods that came out of the water, which subsequently gave rise to a group of insects. From that moment their procession on the planet began. Now there are about a million species known to modern science. According to some estimates, about thirty million scientists have yet to open.
Flora and fauna of carbon
In the Carboniferous period, the formation of coal occurs , which was formed due to the fact that the fallen trees did not have time to decompose and went under water. There they turned into peat and coal. Among the vegetation at that time ferns predominated up to forty-five meters high, with leaves more than a meter long. In addition to trees, huge clowns and horsetails grew. The trees had a very shallow root system. For this reason, everything around was littered with their trunks. In such a forest it was humid and warm. Ferns reached the height of a modern tree. They could exist only in a humid environment. In the Carboniferous period, the first seed plants appear.
Many swamps and backwaters have become ideal spawning grounds for the early amphibians and countless insects. The first spiders appeared. Among the tall trees, huge butterflies, flying cockroaches, mayflies and dragonflies flew. In the slowly decaying vegetation, giant millipedes lived (labed and bipeds). The eyes of the amphibians were bulging and located on the top of a flat and wide head. This helped the arthropod catch food. Soon, evolution gave rise to giant amphibians (up to eight meters in length), as well as creatures without legs, reminiscent of modern snakes. Large organisms still preferred to hunt in the water, and their small brethren gradually moved to land.
The first reptiles appear - microsaurs, which looked like small lizards with short and sharp teeth, with which they broke the hard coverings of insects. Their skin was more moisture permeable and gave them the opportunity to spend their lives outside water. And food for them was more than enough: millipedes, worms and numerous insects. Reptiles gradually no longer need to return to water to lay eggs. They began to lay eggs in the skin. The young were small copies of their parents.