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Late Ordovician Mass Extinction

• Hannover Park, Hooper virtual Museum. Short summary of Late Ordovician mass extinction, includes facts, geologic setting, species affected, and likely cause as continental glaciation.
• University of Southern California, Department of Earth Sciences. Nice outline of the Late Ordovician extinction, with pictures and graphs of the marine invertebrates that were affected and paleogeographic maps showing where glaciers were.
• Big 5 mass extinction events. BBC (British Broadcasting System).  Short, easy-to-read summary of possible causes for this mass extinction event, as wells as information on the other four major mass extinctions.
• Enchanted Learning software. This site is a summary of mass extinctions, but includes a graph on the first page that shows that the Late Ordovician extinction was the greatest extinction of invertebrates.
• Deep Time-Ordovician Period. PBS.org. Summary of life (with links) in the Ordovician with a short summary of the extinction at the end of the Ordovician.
• Stable Isotopes. What can they tell us about oceans, atmospheres, and mass extinction? Jim Marshall, University of Liverpool. Summary of how carbon isotope changes accompany the major mass extinctions, using the end-Ordovician mass extinction as an example.
• National Academies Press. Online version of technical paper by W. Berry and others, University of California, Berkeley, which summarizes data and impacts of continental glaciation and deglaciation on the Late Ordovician mass extinction. A shorter summary of these ideas was published at the Catastrophic Events Conference.
• See also these articles for technical summaries:
  Sheehan, P.M., 2001, The Late Ordovician mass extinction: Annual Reviews of Eearth and Planetary Sciences, v. 29, p. 331-364.

To understand Ice Ages like the one that occurred at the end of the Ordovician Period, see also key links for the Pleistocene ice ages

Some key references (technical articles)

See also mass extinctions (general)

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