The Silurian system was first identified by the Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison, who was examining fossil-bearing sedimentary rock strata in south Wales in the early 1830s.

[17] Whilst the British rocks now identified as belonging to the Silurian System and the lands now thought to have been inhabited in antiquity by the Silures show little correlation (cf.

[18] In 1835 the two men presented a joint paper, under the title On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems, Exhibiting the Order in which the Older Sedimentary Strata Succeed each other in England and Wales, which was the germ of the modern geological time scale.

[19] As it was first identified, the "Silurian" series when traced farther afield quickly came to overlap Sedgwick's "Cambrian" sequence, however, provoking furious disagreements that ended the friendship.

[21] The French geologist Joachim Barrande, building on Murchison's work, used the term Silurian in a more comprehensive sense than was justified by subsequent knowledge.

Despite these modifications in the original groupings of the strata, it is recognized that Barrande established Bohemia as a classic ground for the study of the earliest Silurian fossils.

[26] The high sea levels of the Silurian and the relatively flat land (with few significant mountain belts) resulted in a number of island chains, and thus a rich diversity of environmental settings.

This event is the Caledonian orogeny, a spate of mountain building that stretched from New York State through conjoined Europe and Greenland to Norway.

At the end of the Silurian, sea levels dropped again, leaving telltale basins of evaporites extending from Michigan to West Virginia, and the new mountain ranges were rapidly eroded.

[28] Layers of broken shells (called coquina) provide strong evidence of a climate dominated by violent storms generated then as now by warm sea surfaces.

Each one leaves a similar signature in the geological record, both geochemically and biologically; pelagic (free-swimming) organisms were particularly hard hit, as were brachiopods, corals, and trilobites, and extinctions rarely occur in a rapid series of fast bursts.

[26][31] The climate fluctuations are best explained by a sequence of glaciations, but the lack of tillites in the middle to late Silurian make this explanation problematic.

Extrapolating back from Early Devonian biota, Andrew Jeram et al. in 1990[48] suggested a food web based on as-yet-undiscovered detritivores and grazers on micro-organisms.

[54] Brachiopods that survived the LOME developed novel adaptations for environmental stress,[55] and they tended to be endemic to a single palaeoplate in the mass extinction's aftermath, but expanded their range afterwards.

[65] The Silurian was a heyday for tentaculitoids,[66] which experienced an evolutionary radiation focused mainly in Baltoscandia,[67] along with an expansion of their geographic range in the Llandovery and Wenlock.

[68] Trilobites started to recover in the Rhuddanian,[69] and they continued to enjoy success in the Silurian as they had in the Ordovician despite their reduction in clade diversity as a result of LOME.