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Jan 26, 1000
4-4.5 billion years ago
After Earth, a large impact formed what we now know as the moon. -
Jan 26, 1001
2.5-4 billion years ago
The Archean eon are the earliest traces of life. It was limited to oceans and was only single celled. -
Jan 26, 1002
1-2.5 billion years ago
Cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis, producing oxygen. Eukaryotes emerged and some multicellular life. -
Jan 26, 1003
485-541million years ago
Cambrian period- Lineages of animals diversified. Trilobites and other dominated the oceans ecosystems. -
Jan 26, 1004
419-485 million years ago
Moss like plants grew on land and early fishes diversified. -
Jan 26, 1005
358-419 million years ago
Invertebrates and insects lived on land and plants began to form forests. -
Jan 26, 1006
298-358
Seed plants produced a swampy forest like state and amphibian like animals diversified on land. -
Jan 26, 1007
200-298 million years ago
There were massive environmental changes. Volcanic eruptions are believed to have wiped out over 90% of all species. This was the emergence of dinosaurs. -
Jan 26, 1009
66-200 million years ago
Dinosaurs were the largest predators and herbivores on land. Two of there reptiles, the pterosaurs and birds, came about in the sky. Flooring plants were dominating most forests and being pollinated by insects. Any mammals were small and mainly nocturnal. -
Jan 26, 1010
2.5 - 66 million years ago
Mammals started to replace dinosaurs and change in climate led to the spread of grasslands. -
Jan 26, 1011
2.5 million years ago
The change in climate led to cycles of ice ages. Apes began to evolve into human beings. -
Jan 26, 1012
200,000 years ago
The origin of homo sapiens. -
Darwin
A year after meeting with Wallace and the Linnean Society, Darwin published his first book titled "On the Origin of Species". -
Mendel and his peas
Gregor Mendel discovered that by studying peas he realized there was something to how one inherited a specific trait and how that trait could be manipulated. -
Darwin and the humans
In 1871, Darwin went on to publish another book titled "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex". This went on to discuss how humans have evolved. -
1900's
In the early 1900's, physicists discovered that atoms were either in a permanently stable or unstable state. Later, this led to the discovery that isotopes could be used in measuring how old something is. -
1900's
Early 1900's, scientists discovered that entities called genes controlled inherited traits. -
Burgess Shale
In 1909, Charles Doolittle Walcott was high on the mountain tops slopes of British Columbia. Here is where the quarries of Burgess shale have now yeilded to more than 65,000 specimens of mostly soft bodied animals representing around 93 species. -
1950's
In the 1950's, scientists figured out how genetic information was stored as DNA. -
Oldest fossil of our own
Scientists discovered the fossils of humans at a site in the Omo River Valley in southern Ethiopia. After extensive amounts of research and study [and three decades later], they came to the conclusion that the fossils were as old as 195000 years. Thanks to this, these fossils are considered the oldest known fossils of members of our own species. -
Cave Drawings
In 1994, cave explorers in France discovered chambers filled with paintings of various animals. The painters had used several ingredients for their pigments, including some charcoal made from burning wood. After studying and researching, they've come to the conclusion that the cave is 32,000 years old. -
1999
Shortly after measuring isotopes, the earth's age came into question again. As Kelvin had stated earlier that the earth was less than 20 million years old, we would see many of those short-lived isotopes in rocks; however, according to Miller, our planet has existed long enough that all of it's short-lived isotopes have decayed to levels so low that we can no longer detect them. -
The start of Radiometric Dating
A technique used to estimate the exact age at which one geological formation ends and another begins. -
John Hutchinson and Mariano Garcia
In 2002, Hutchinson and Garcia developed a biomechanics model of running animals to determine how much force leg muscles of a certain size could generate. -
CT Scans
In 2009, David Evans,Lawrence Witmer, and Ryan Ridgely used a CT scanner to probe the skulls of a particularly bizarre group of dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs.
