Devonian events and correlations / Девонские события и корреляция

The Devonian was a peculiar time in the Phanerozoic evolution of the Earth. Most continents, including the large Gondwana and Laurussia cratons, formed a Pangea-type assembly around the tropical Prototethys and an increasingly hot, global, greenhouse climate prevailed, with a complete lack of major ice sheets, even in polar areas. There was gradual and increasing flooding of the continents, creating huge epicontinental seas that have no modern analogues. Under these conditions the plants finally conquered the land, with the innovation of deep roots in the Emsian, the appearance of seed precursors and trees in the Givetian, and the spread of vegetation into dry uplands in the late Famennian. In the marine realm, the largestknown Phanerozoic tropical reef belts surrounded craton margins and tropical islands. It was the time of the sudden radiation of early ammonoids, of the earliest episodic blooms of calcareousshelled, pelagic zooplankton (tentaculitoids), the rise to dominance of fishes, mostly of armoured forms and with giants reaching 10 m in length, but also including the first sharks, and the appearance of earliest tetrapods in marginal settings. However, the tropical and subtropical areas reaching up to 458 latitude were hardly a paradise. <...>