Cenozoic
Youngest Phanerozoic era, containing Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary.
Language and route: English scientific compound from Greek. Phillips wrote Cainozoic (1841), using a combining form of Greek kainós; the modern form is Cenozoic.
Literal gloss: new life
The name and its history
John Phillips · 1841
- What does the word literally mean?
- Kainós, ‘new, recent’, contrasted with older fossil worlds. This is a nineteenth-century faunal comparison, not a claim that modern species appeared all at once.
- What did the original author mean?
- Phillips’s ‘new life’ referred to relatively modern faunal assemblages.
- Why was the name needed?
- The label grouped newer fossil-bearing successions in a faunal rather than purely ordinal ‘Tertiary’ framework.
- What evidence supported the original concept?
- Comparative fossils, not a first appearance of all living species, were the basis of the historical distinction.
- How has geology changed the concept?
- The current Cenozoic contains Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary; many living groups had earlier histories.
Further historical context
John Phillips published Cainozoic alongside Palaeozoic and Mesozoic in 1841, deliberately organising geological time by changes in fossil life.
His broad ‘new life’ did not imply the present three-period Cenozoic arrangement. The ordinal label Tertiary largely survived alongside it before the present Paleogene–Neogene–Quaternary framework.
Editorial qualification
No known contested attribution identified in this pass; source checks remain subject to peer review.
Related names
Mesozoic · Paleogene · Neogene · Quaternary · Tertiary · Paleozoic · Paleocene · Holocene · Fossil
Sources
- ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart, 2026/06 — Current name, rank and numerical boundaries
- Phillips (1841), Figures and Descriptions of the Palaeozoic Fossils — Digitised original source for three life-based eras
- Morrell (2001), Genesis and geochronology: John Phillips — Historical analysis of Phillips’s 1841 era scheme
- ICS Subcommission: History of Quaternary nomenclature — Primary/Secondary/Tertiary/Quaternary; historical interpretation