Famennian
second and last stage and age of the Upper Devonian Series / Late Devonian Epoch
The Famennian is the later of two faunal stages in the Late Devonian epoch. The most recent estimate for its duration is that it lasted from 372.15 million years ago to 358.86 million years ago. It was preceded by the Frasnian stage and followed by the Tournaisian stage.
Major events
In the seas, a novel major group of ammonoid cephalopods called clymeniids appeared, underwent tremendous diversification and spread worldwide, then just as suddenly went extinct.
The beginning of the Famennian is marked by the final stages of a major extinction event, the Kellwasser Event, which is the largest component of the Late Devonian mass extinction. The end of the Famennian experiences a smaller but still quite severe extinction event, the Hangenberg Event. A brief episode of glaciation, possibly linked to the Hangenberg event, occurred during the late Famennian, the first in a series of short glaciations that preceded the Late Palaeozoic ice age of the Carboniferous and Permian periods.
Subdivisions
The International Commission on Stratigraphy divides the Famennian into four informal substages based primarily on conodont zonation. The Famennian corresponds to four historical subdivisions in German stratigraphy: the Nehdenian, Hembergian, Dasbergian, and Wocklumian (from oldest to youngest). However, these are based solely on ammonoid zonation and do not precisely correspond to the informal ICS subdivisions.
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This entry incorporates text from “Famennian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.