The Devonian Period The Strangest 60 Million Year

Four hundred million years ago Earth had no birds, no dinosaurs, no mammals, no grass, and no flowers. The continents were unrecognizable. The sky was a different color. And the oceans were ruled by armored monsters so strange and so powerful that nothing like them has existed before or since. This was the Devonian Period, the Age of Fishes, and it was one of the most consequential intervals in the entire history of life on Earth. In these sixty million years the first forests appeared and nearly accidentally froze the planet. The first creature with limbs crawled out of shallow water and changed the trajectory of vertebrate life forever. The most dominant predators in ocean history evolved and then vanished completely without a single descendant. And deep in warm coastal swamps, fish were assembling the exact skeleton that you are using right now to watch this video. Your arms are modified fish fins. Your fingers trace directly back to the bones of Tiktaalik, a creature that lived in an Arctic river delta three hundred and seventy-five million years ago when that river delta was on the equator. The Devonian is not ancient history. It is structural biology. It is inside your body. It is under your feet in the coal that still powers the modern world. It is in the oil fields drilled by the petroleum industry. It is in the rounded hills of Scotland and the ridges of the Appalachians. And it ended in one of the five greatest mass extinctions in the history of complex life, a catastrophe caused in significant part by the very forests that made the period extraordinary. SUBSCRIBE    / @chroniclesplanetearth   to explore the full story of the period that invented our world, our bodies, and the fuel that runs our civilization. SUBSCRIBE for more documentaries: