From 280 million to 345 million years ago

Usage examples of carboniferous.

I need give only one instance, namely, the manner in which the fossils of the Devonian system, when this system was first discovered, were at once recognised by palaeontologists as intermediate in character between those of the overlying carboniferous, and underlying Silurian system.

To interpret rocks, there needs to be some means of correlation, a basis on which you can tell that those carboniferous rocks from Devon are younger than these Cambrian rocks from Wales.

Was it the steaming jungle of the Carboniferous, the bleak shoreline over which the first amphibians must crawl to conquer the land-or, earlier still, the long loneliness before the coming of life?

Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes.

Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident.

The long-ago seas of the Carboniferous and Devonian swarmed with tiny plankton that wrapped themselves inside tiny protective shells.

Created from the lush vegetation and animal fats of the Carboniferous and adjoining periods, holding in itself the black essence of all life that had ever been, constituting in fact a great deep-digged black graveyard of the ultimate eldritch past with blackest ghosts, oil had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams, sluggishly pulsing beneath Earth's stony skin, quivering in lightless pools roofed with marsh gas and in top-filled rocky tanks and coursing through myriad channels and through spongy rocky bone, until a being evolved on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself.

Lyell and Dawson found carboniferous beds 1400 feet thick in Nova Scotia, with ancient root-bearing strata, one above the other, at no less than sixty-eight different levels.

This, as it belongs to the Upper Devonian or Lower Carboniferous, determines a lower limit for the age of the sandstone formation.

There were the sallow lower chalk, the coffee−coloured Hastings beds, the lighter Ashburnham beds, the dark carboniferous clays, and then, gleaming in the electric light, band after band of jet−black, sparkling coal alternating with the rings of clay.

No oil left, no coal left - if Mars ever had a Carboniferous Age - and no water-power - just the driblets of energy they can get from the sun.

But put him back in the Carboniferous Age and he wouldn't think any better than a dinosaur.

But put him back in the Carboniferous Age and he wouldnt think any better than a dinosaur.

Thus conversing we followed the intricate trail toward the temple, which we came upon in a small clearing surrounded by enormous trees similar to those which must have flourished upon the outer crust during the carboniferous age.

When carbon dioxide concentration goes up as a result of volcanic action, the planet heats up a bit and you have a carboniferous age with oceans high and land surface at a minimum.