What's in a name? Why do certain
phenomena have certain names? To my mind, one of the most fascinating
and idiosyncratic naming processes was that of naming the periods in
prehistory up to the end of the dinosaurs: Cambrian, Devonian,
Silurian, Ordivician, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.
Generations of palaeontologists, geologists, bonehunters and
schoolchildren have had them rolling off their tongues, probably with
no real idea of how these names actually came about, what they're
named after, and how the names have resonated in time.
So, how did these periods get their
names? Clearly, the people who researched these times over the last
couple of hundred years, after interest in the prehistory of the
world really took off, had their own favoured naming strategies.
Let's start at the beginning, quite literally
The first period of the Palaeozoic Era,
literally “ancient-life era”, was the Cambrian period, from about
541m to 485m years ago. It was characterised by the first explosion
of multi-cellular life forms, the fossils of which were first found
in rocks in Wales, known as Cambria in Latin, and Cymru (pronounced
“come-ree”) in modern Welsh, ultimately from an ancient British
form meaning “fellow countrymen”.
The Cambrian was followed by the
Ordivician, which lasted until about 443m years ago. The Ordivices
were a Celtic tribe living in North Wales and conquered by the Romans
in 77-78CE. Their name was applied to the period whose rocks mostly
appeared in their territory. The Ordivician was followed by the
Silurian period, lasting till about 419m years ago, the Silures being
a tribe living around South Wales and the English borders, where the
rocks from that era predominated. Strangely, the use of Silurian to
describe an ancient race of human-like reptiles in Doctor Who is
inappropriate, not because the Welsh tribe actually consisted of
humans as opposed to reptiles, but because no reptiles existed at the
time, the most dominant life forms being early bony fish and giant
sea scorpions
So far, so Welsh. For the next period,
we have to move south, across the Bristol Channel. The Devonian
period lasted till around 359m years ago, and was named, surprisingly
enough, after Devon, where such rocks abound. However, Devon gets its
name from the Dumnonii, a Celtic tribe which occupied the furthest
south-western region of Britain, so in essence, they were an
extension of the Welsh. So there we have it; the first four
Palaeozoic periods named effectively after ancient British tribes.
So what of the next one? Was there a
tribe called the Carboniferi? No. The Carboniferous period, which
lasted till about 299m years ago, literally means “carbon-bearing”,
because this was the period when huge forests dominated the land and
were transformed over time into the coal that fuelled the industrial
revolution. This was followed by the Permian period, the last of the
Palaeozoic, lasting till about 252m years ago. So, who were the
Perms, actually, Permians, and how were they related to the Welsh
tribes? Well, they weren't. Permia was a medieval kingdom on the
western slopes of the Urals in Russia and gave its name to the age as
a result of the rocks found there which dated from that era
The Mesozoic, or Middle Life, Era is
probably the most famous in prehistory, mainly because it was the
period of the dinosaurs. The first of the three Mesozoic periods was
the Triassic, running till about 200m years ago and named after the
three-colour rock formations, black on white on red, which were found
mainly in Germany. Then the most famous period, the Jurassic,
followed, lasting till about 145m years ago and named after the Jura
mountains straddling the French-Swiss border. The third and last
period, lasting till the end of the dinosaurs about 66m years ago,
was the Cretaceous, named after the Latin for chalk, creta,
which was laid down in western Europe in the shallow seas of this
period.
So,
there we have it: Wales and two of its tribes, an ancient west
country tribe, bearers of carbon, a province in Russia, three German
rock layers, French/Swiss mountains and western European chalk; a
motley and varied crew defining almost 500m years of prehistory,
named mostly according to the personal whims of the geologists who
defined them. And if you look into virtually any other area of
science, you will find remarkably similar stories.
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