Crossword clues for silurian
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Silurian \Si*lu"ri*an\, n. The Silurian age.
Silurian \Si*lu"ri*an\, a. [From L. Silures, a people who anciently inhabited a part of England and Wales.] (Geol.) Of or pertaining to the country of the ancient Silures; -- a term applied to the earliest of the Paleozoic eras, and also to the strata of the era, because most plainly developed in that country.
Note: The Silurian formation, so named by Murchison, is divided into the Upper Silurian and Lower Silurian. The lower part of the Lower Silurian, with some underlying beds, is now separated under the name Cambrian, first given by Sedwick. Recently the term Ordovician has been proposed for the Lower Silurian, leawing the original word to apply only to the Upper Silurian.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1708, "pertaining to the Silures," from Latin Silures "ancient British tribe inhabiting southeast Wales." Geological sense is from 1835, coined by Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792-1871) because rocks of this period are especially frequent in Wales.
Wikipedia
The Silurian is a geologic period and system that extends from the end of the Ordovician Period, at million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Devonian Period, Mya. As with other geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period's start and end are well identified, but the exact dates are uncertain by several million years. The base of the Silurian is set at a major extinction event when 60% of marine species were wiped out. See Ordovician-Silurian extinction events.
A significant evolutionary milestone during the Silurian was the diversification of jawed and bony fish. Life also began to appear on land in the form of small, moss-like, vascular plants that grew beside lakes, streams, and coastlines, and also in the form of small terrestrial arthropods. However, terrestrial life would not greatly diversify and affect the landscape until the Devonian.
The Silurians are a fictional race of reptile-like humanoids in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The species first appeared in Doctor Who in the 1970 serial Doctor Who and the Silurians, and were created by Malcolm Hulke. The first Silurians introduced are depicted as prehistoric and scientifically advanced sentient humanoids who predate the dawn of man; in their backstory, the Silurians went into self-induced hibernation to survive what they predicted to be a large atmospheric upheaval caused by the Earth capturing the Moon. The Silurians introduced in the 1970 story are broad, three-eyed land-dwellers. The 1972 serial The Sea Devils also by Hulke introduced their amphibious cousins, the so-called "Sea Devils". Both Silurians and Sea Devils made an appearance in 1984's Warriors of the Deep. After Warriors of the Deep, the Silurians did not appear in the show again before its 1989 cancellation. Heavily redesigned Silurans were reintroduced to the series in 2010, following the show's 2005 revival, and have recurred frequently since then.
Commonly called Silurians, after their supposed origins in the Silurian period, the creatures have also been referred to by other names. In The Sea Devils, the Third Doctor ( Jon Pertwee) claims that "properly speaking", the Silurians should have been called " Eocenes". The name homo reptilia is first used to describe the creatures in the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (1974), and is first used in the series proper in the episode " The Hungry Earth" (2010). In The Sea Devils, an amphibious Silurian is dubbed a "Sea Devil" by the human workman Clark ( Declan Mulholland), while in Warriors of the Deep, the land-dwelling Silurians use the term "Sea Devil" to refer to their aquatic counterparts.
Silurian may refer to:
- Silurian, the geological period and system lasting roughly from 445 million years ago to 415 million years ago
- Silurian, the society, culture, language, and ethnicity of the Silures, an ancient Welsh tribe
- Silurian, the racehorse that won the 1923 Doncaster Cup
- Silurian (Doctor Who), a fictional race of humanoid reptiles who existed before humanity
- Silurian Hills, a small range of hills in the Mojave Desert
- Siluria Technologies, a San Francisco-based technology company
Usage examples of "silurian".
Therefore it is quite possible, as we have seen in the case of some Silurian forms, that a species might go on being slightly modified in relation to its slightly altered conditions of life, and yet retain throughout a vast period the same general characteristics.
We shall see this by turning to the diagram: the letters, A to L, may represent eleven Silurian genera, some of which have produced large groups of modified descendants.
No, strike that, the Silurian grayfish Phlox had swimming in his tank down in sickbay could do a better job.
Empty platforms rushed past, their names in title: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic.
The Silurian period follows the Ordovician, and the Miocene epoch follows the Oligocene as surely as Wednesday follows Tuesday.
Silurians alone were silent as the spears splintered the pavement and the warrior cheers echoed in the smoky cavernous dark.
Silurians ran screaming from their line and hurled their long spears at the centre of our defence.
The two men unbound their hair, took up their spears and swords, then danced in front of the Silurian line.
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.
Why do we not find great piles of strata beneath the Silurian system, stored with the remains of the progenitors of the Silurian groups of fossils?
Barrande has lately added another and lower stage to the Silurian system, abounding with new and peculiar species.
In 1839, when Roderick Murchison published The Silurian System, a plump and ponderous study of a type of rock called greywacke, it was an instant bestseller, racing through four editions, even though it cost eight guineas a copy and was, in true Huttonian style, unreadable.
The issue arose when the Reverend Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge claimed for the Cambrian period a layer of rock that Roderick Murchison believed belonged rightly to the Silurian.
The cliffs are early Triassic sandstone laid atop Permian coal measures, under which lie the granites, shales and limestones of Devonian and Silurian times.
So the Old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in, and at the same time the great work of building Old Red Sandstone mountains eighty thousand feet high to cold-storage their fossils in was begun.