Serpukhovian Age

The Serpukhovian Stage (331–323 Ma) is the third age in the Carboniferous Period, occurring after the Visean age, and before the Bashkirian age

What happened during this time?

Study on the Paleozoic floras from North America and Europe indicate that leaf shape diversity (=disparity) peaked during the mid-Carboniferous (Boyce and Knoll 2002, Boyce 2005)
Diversification of plants after this point did not affect the diversity of leaf shapes (disparity).
It is possible to conclude that plants had exhausted their potential for evolving novel leaf traits by this time and diversity and disparity were unlinked after this point

Sea levels were moderate throughout this age Carboniferous, but the seas rose steadily through most of the Sepukhovian,
Sea levels drop rather sharply at the end of the Age, with the onset of icehouse conditions and the beginnings of the Pennsylvanian Ice Age (Grossman et al. 2002; Mii et al. 2001).
At about this same time, the connection between the Rheic and Paleotethys Oceans closed as Gondwana met and sutured to Laurussia (North America plus Baltica) to form Pangaea.
- This resulted in partial thermal isolation of the Paleotethys, which became a great semi-tropical bay. The climate, which had been fairly equable throughout most of the Mississippian, became more strongly zonal.