July 10, 2006
Evolutionary Timeline to Scale
Recently, I've linked to web page scale models of the solar system and a hydrogen atom.
If you liked those, this might interest you: Evolutionary Timeline. It stretches life's history (from the earliest life on Earth through the present) across 135 feet of scrolling web page.
Like the other pages, this one provides useful perspective. It takes a lot of scrolling just to get to the first eukaryotic cells, after which it takes a lot more scrolling to get to the Cambrian explosion. The history of the genus Homo fits in the last inch or so.
It's a pretty effective approach for illustrating the depth of time. I'd like to see it expanded to include the history of the universe.... but that would increase the scrolling immensely.
One approach that has often been used is to condense the history of life (or the universe) into a 24-hour period, or a year. (In fact, the author of this timeline has a chart of a 'one year' timeline of life here.)
In Cosmos, Carl Sagan used a 12-month calendar to represent the history of the known universe. In this analogy, Earth doesn't form until the year's half over, the Cambrian explosion occurs on December 15th, Dinosaurs show up on the 24th, humans on the evening of the 31st, and all of written history takes up the last ten seconds of the year. As with the cephalopod video yesterday, I've taken the liberty of ripping an 8½ minute clip for you (15 MB, this time in MPEG-4, but QuickTime or VLC will still work). The information in the simplified story is a bit dated for nitpickers like me, but it's remarkably accurate considering its nearly thirty-year age.
Update: Here's an interactive Flash timeline of evolution. (It's a cool idea and has lots of good biology info., but the presentation is slightly confusing and far too busy.)
10 Jul 23:32 | Link | Category: Cool Links, Human/Primate Evolution & Behavior, Science, Video