The name Tertiary was introduced by Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino in 1760 as the second youngest division of Earth’s rocks. The oldest rocks were the primitive, or “primary,” igneous and metamorphic rocks (composed of schists, granites, and basalts) that formed the core of the high mountains in Europe. Arduino designated rocks composed predominantly of shales and limestones in northern Italy as elements of the fossiliferous “secondary,” or Mesozoic, group. He considered younger groups of fossiliferous sedimentary rocks, found chiefly at lower elevations, as “tertiary” rocks and the smaller pebbles and gravel that covered them as “quaternary” rocks. Although originally intended as a descriptive generalization of rock types, many of Arduino’s contemporaries and successors gave these categories a temporal connotation and equated them with rocks formed prior to, during, and after the Noachian deluge. In 1810 French mineralogist, geologist, and naturalist Alexandre Brongniart included all the sedimentary deposits of the Paris Basin in his terrains tertiares, or Tertiary. Soon thereafter all rocks younger than Mesozoic in western Europe were called Tertiary.

The subdivision of the Tertiary into smaller units was originally based on fossil faunas of western Europe that were known to 19th-century natural scientists. These faunas primarily contained mollusks exhibiting varying degrees of similarity with modern types. At the same time, the science of stratigraphy was in its infancy, and the primary focus of its earliest practitioners was to use the newly discovered sequential progression of fossils in layered sedimentary rocks to establish a global sequence of temporally ordered stages. Scottish geologist Charles Lyell employed a simple statistical measure based on the relative percentages of living species of mollusks to fossil mollusks found in different layers of Tertiary rocks. These percentages had been compiled by Lyell’s colleague and friend Gérard-Paul Deshayes, a French geologist who had amassed a collection of more than 40,000 mollusks and was preparing a monograph on the mollusks of the Paris Basin.

In 1833 Lyell divided the Tertiary into four subdivisions (from older to younger): Eocene, Miocene, the “older Pliocene,” and the “newer Pliocene.” (The latter was renamed Pleistocene in 1839.) The Eocene contained about 3 percent of the living mollusk species, the Miocene about 20 percent, the older Pliocene more than one-third and often over 50 percent, and the newer Pliocene about 90 percent. Lyell traveled extensively and had a broad and comprehensive understanding of the regional geology for his day. He understood, for example, that rocks of the Tertiary were unevenly distributed over Europe and that there were no rocks of the younger part of the period in the Paris Basin. He used the deposits in the Paris, Hampshire, and London basins as typical for the Eocene. For the Miocene he used the sediments of the Loire Basin near Touraine, the deposits in the Aquitaine Basin near Bordeaux in southwestern France, and the Bormida River valley and Superga near Turin, Italy. The sub-Apennine formations of northern Italy were used for the older Pliocene, and the marine strata in the Gulf of Noto, on the Island of Ischia (also in Italy), and near Uddevalla (in Sweden) were used for the newer Pliocene.

The limits between Lyell’s Tertiary subdivisions were not rigidly specified, and Lyell himself recognized the approximate and imperfect nature of his scheme. Indeed, in their original form, Lyell’s subdivisions would today be termed biostratigraphic units (bodies of rocks characterized by particular fossil assemblages) rather than chronostratigraphic units (bodies of rocks deposited during a specific interval of time).

Subsequent stratigraphic studies in northern Europe showed that deposits were included variously in the upper Eocene or lower Miocene by different geologists of the day. This situation led German geologist H.E. Beyrich, in 1854, to create the term Oligocene for rocks in the North German Basin and Mainz Basin and to insert it between the Eocene and the Miocene in the stratigraphic scheme. As originally proposed, the Oligocene included the Tongrian and Rupelian stages as well as strata that subsequently formed the basis for the Chattian Stage. The Tongrian is no longer used as a standard unit, its place being taken by the Rupelian.

The term Paleocene was proposed by German paleobotanist Wilhelm P. Schimper in 1874 on the basis of fossil floras in the Paris Basin that he considered intermediate between Cretaceous and Eocene forms. Typical strata include the sands of Bracheux, the travertines of Sézanne, and the lignites and sandstones of Soissons. The problem of the Paleocene is that, of all the chronostratigraphic units of the Tertiary, it alone is defined on the basis of nonmarine strata, making recognition of its upper limit and general correlation difficult elsewhere. Acceptance of the term Paleocene into the general system of stratigraphic names was irregular, and only in 1939 did the United States Geological Survey, general arbiter of standard stratigraphic nomenclature in North America, formally accept it. The Danian Stage was proposed by the Swiss geologist Pierre Jean Édouard Desor in 1846 for chalk deposits in Denmark. It was assigned to the Cretaceous by virtue of the similarity of its invertebrate megafossils to those of the latest Cretaceous elsewhere. However, since the late 1950s, micropaleontologists have recognized that calcareous marine plankton (foraminiferans and coccolith-bearing nannoplankton) exhibit a major taxonomic change at the boundary between the Maastrichtian (uppermost Cretaceous) Stage and the Danian (lowermost Tertiary) Stage. The Danian is now widely regarded as being the oldest stage of the Cenozoic.

In 1948 the 18th International Geological Congress placed the base of the Pleistocene at the base of the marine strata of the Calabrian Stage of southern Italy, using the initial appearance of northern or cool-water invertebrate faunas in Mediterranean marine strata as the marker. Subsequent studies showed that the type section was ill-chosen and that the base of the Calabrian Stage was equivalent to much younger levels within the Pleistocene. A newly designated stratotype section was chosen at Vrica in Calabria, and for a time the base of the Pleistocene was found comparable to a level dated to nearly 1.8 million years ago. In 2009 the IUGS ratified the decision by the ICS to align the base of the Pleistocene (and thus the top of the Neogene System) with the base of the Gelasian Stage.