Prehistoric Oklahoma is a term covering several billion years, from the origin of our planet through the sixteenth century. The oldest remaining geological layers are igneous and metamorphic rocks from the Precambrian and Cambrian period. The layers on top of these are the result of Oklahoma being alternately covered and uncovered by shallow seas. According to the Geologic History of Oklahoma, "Following Pennsylvanian mountain building, an Early Permian (Wolfcampian) shallow inland sea covered most of western Oklahoma and the Panhandle."
The Permian period extended from approximately 298.9 million to 252.2 million years ago. The Witchita and Ozark mountains would have been prominent features in the landscape, gradually eroding over the duration of the period. The areas bordering the seas would have included limestones, gray and red shales, and sandstones.
The "Red Beds" of Oklahoma have been a particularly fertile area for paleontologists, revealing samples of several tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs) including the Dimetrodon, Edaphosaurus, Platyhystrix and Seymouria. Dimetrodons were particularly distinctive features of the landscape, having long tails and dramatic sails on their backs.
As the climate became drier over the course of the Permian period, the lush growth of ferns and horsetails was gradually replaced by seed plants. A display in the Sam Noble Museum includes an artist's reconstruction of a Permian landscape:
http://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/common-fossils-of-oklahoma/paleocommunities/terrestrial-communities/permian/
http://www.ogs.ou.edu/pubsscanned/EP9_2-8geol.pdf
https://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/common-fossils-of-oklahoma/gallery/permian-fossil-gallery/
Saturday, July 14, 2012
I need a Claim, Evidence, Reasoning paragraph, using images of fossils from the Permian period, that answers the question: "What did prehistoric Oklahoma look like?"
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