The Tertiary is a term for a geologic period 65 million to 2.588 million years ago. The Tertiary covered the time span between the superseded Secondary period and the Quaternary. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, at start of the Cenozoic era, spanning to beginning of the most recent Ice Age, at the end of the Pliocene epoch. Historical use of the term The term Tertiary was first used by Giovanni Arduino in 1759. He cla… (More on Tertiary)