Quaternary Period

Ice ages, giant mammals, and the rise of humans.

◷ 2.58 Ma – present❖ Cenozoic Era

The Quaternary is the most recent geological period, beginning about 2.58 million years ago and continuing today. It spans two epochs — the Pleistocene (the great Ice Age) and the Holocene (our current warm interval) — and is defined by dramatic climate swings and the rise of humans.

PaleoDex Continental Drift map set to the Quaternary, with fossil hotspots across the modern continents. — The Continental Drift map on the Quaternary — modern continents, Ice-Age hotspots.

GEOLOGIC POSITION

Eon	Phanerozoic
Era	Cenozoic Era
Span	2.58 Ma – present
Duration	ongoing (~2.58 My so far)
Preceded by	Neogene
Followed by	— (current period)

AT A GLANCE

Climate	Marked by repeated ice ages — cycles of glacial advance and retreat — continuing into the present interglacial.
Geography	Continents sat in essentially their modern positions; growing ice sheets locked up water, lowering sea levels and opening land bridges between continents.
Key life	The age of Ice Age megafauna — Smilodon, mammoths, and giant ground sloths — and of the genus Homo, which evolved and spread worldwide.

The world then

The continents were where we find them now, but the climate was not. Vast ice sheets repeatedly advanced and retreated across the northern hemisphere; each glacial phase locked up so much water that sea levels dropped, exposing land bridges that animals — and people — crossed.

Life

This is the world of Ice Age giants: Smilodon the saber-toothed cat, woolly mammoths, and giant ground sloths roamed alongside early humans. Many of these megafauna vanished in a wave of extinctions near the end of the Pleistocene, around 10,000 years ago.

Up to today

The Quaternary is still running — we live in the Holocene, the most recent slice of it. It's the period closest to us in time, and the one where prehistory meets recorded human history.

In the catalogue Genera from this period in the PaleoDex Fossil Library:

◆ Smilodon

Sources

Compiled by PaleoDex from open scientific data. Boundary ages follow the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS); descriptions draw on Wikipedia/Wikimedia. Where a fact isn't sourced, we leave it out rather than guess.

· Wikipedia · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart

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