Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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Category: Evolution • Science
Posted on: April 12, 2006 2:06 PM, by PZ Myers
A very cool idea: portray the Evolutionary Timeline on a web page, drawing it so that one pixel equals 30,000 years.
Go to the page and just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
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Comments
I had a dinosaur book as a kid with a two page spread as a timeline that started only as recently as the Triassic. It squeezed everything from that to present day onto those two pages, condensing the entire existance of modern man down to a 1mm width line, or maybe it was 2mm. This is even cooler and gives me an even better understanding of how little time we've been here compared to, say, eukaryotes.
Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Tara Mobley | April 12, 2006 2:31 PM
But what about the footsteps across the top? Isn't that proof that humans were around all the time?
Posted by: hilllady | April 12, 2006 2:40 PM
Very cool. Bookmarked.
One question: When I was eight years old and obsessed with dinosaurs, most of my books separated the age of the dinosaurs into the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous eras. There's no Cretaceous on that page. Has there been some renaming of the eras in the last ten or fifteen years?
Posted by: Jeremy | April 12, 2006 2:45 PM
Great idea. Some irritating comments on the bottom of the page, though:
Someone's going to use that as ammunition. Isn't a scientific theory supposed to be as close to a fact as you can get?Ohhhhhhh brother.
Posted by: rainbows4dinosaurs | April 12, 2006 2:50 PM
I've been in some meetings that reminded me of that timeline.
Posted by: pablo | April 12, 2006 2:53 PM
No, the Cretaceous ain't going away. It's just an omission on the web page.
Posted by: PZ Myers | April 12, 2006 2:53 PM
I've considered making a similar page that similarly laid out the dimensions of the solar system on a single very long web page.
Posted by: fwiffo | April 12, 2006 3:14 PM
fwiffo: When I was in sixth grade, our science teacher took us down to the soccer field to illustrate the solar system to scale. I think he used a soccer ball as the sun. He put it in the corner, then marked of so many steps and put a little pebble down as Mercury, then more steps and put down a slightly larger pebble as Venus, then a lot more steps and put down Earth, then about twice as many steps as that and Mars... eventually we had gone across two soccer fields and we were at Saturn. And Pluto would have been halfway across town.
Posted by: Jeremy | April 12, 2006 3:18 PM
Great idea, but it would be better without the goofy "Evolution is not a fact" tag at the bottom. Like that was helpful.
Posted by: Zeno | April 12, 2006 3:19 PM
Evolution *isn't* a fact? A fact, as best I understand it, is something that is observably true. Such as, say, the sun rose yesterday. Anybody awake at the time would verify it for themselves. "The sun will rise tomorrow," is not quite a fact, since we can't observe it right now, but it does make for a pretty solid statement.
Posted by: Ollie | April 12, 2006 3:20 PM
If you look very carefully on the rightmost side of the page, you can see where pygmies and dwarfs first appeared.
Posted by: snorkle | April 12, 2006 3:21 PM
Note to Opera users:
Page doesn't render correctly. You'll have to fire up something else. Otherwise, it appears that humans and eukaryotes begin at the same pixel.
Posted by: JoeB | April 12, 2006 3:22 PM
"I've considered making a similar page that similarly laid out the dimensions of the solar system on a single very long web page."
The Evolutionary Timeline author credits as inspiriation a page that does just that: http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/
Very cool.
Posted by: hilllady | April 12, 2006 3:23 PM
Ugh, my time in church reminds me of this timeline.
Posted by: cmotdibbler | April 12, 2006 3:59 PM
Pushing the color bars into the "future" to make space for labels makes the timeline for us and other recent species look a lot longer than it really is. The non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, the birds extend the dinosaur timeline right up to today.
Posted by: BJN | April 12, 2006 4:09 PM
Hmmm...a "vertical" format would be more preferable to me...I hate scrolling across. Very nicely done, though.
Posted by: John | April 12, 2006 4:35 PM
That evolution occured is simply a fact. If you want to split hairs, the ideas describing how it occured are the theory.
Posted by: dAVE | April 12, 2006 4:48 PM
BJN: As he says, the right side of the chart is screwed up in everything that's not Firefox. He's right. The bars don't extend to fit the labels in Firefox, so everything lines up fine.
Posted by: Patrick | April 12, 2006 4:54 PM
It's good if you scroll sideways. Not so great if you scroll down.
Posted by: Troutnut | April 12, 2006 4:56 PM
Cool idea. No time-scale shows up in my browser. A few pictures might help. And why so much detail around homo sapiens? Why not cephalopods?
Posted by: C | April 12, 2006 5:08 PM
I did something similar with the age of the Earth using Excel and showing all of the eras, periods and epochs.
It printed on multiple sheets which I taped together and wrapped around my office wall. Only in the last inch or so did it expose the Quarternary epoch (about now to 1.8 millions years ago). Then I printed off a human evolution timeline from the web and drew lines to show that it all fits within that tiny inch of space.
This was after having some discussions with co-workers about evolution - I thought most people don't appreciate how long 5 billion years is.
On a tangent - I use this analogy to instruct people on the difference between 1 million and 1 billion: I tell someone that 1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, and then ask them to guess on gut feel (without calculating) how long 1 billion seconds is, they usually guess a few hundred days or several years. Most are shocked to find out that a billion seconds is over 32 years!
Posted by: Alan | April 12, 2006 5:24 PM
I thought evolution was a fact and a theory? And yeah, the text is screwed up in Firefox, but besides the awkward fluff at the bottom--- it's really neat. Solar system: wow, I didn't know Mercury was microscopic compared to the Sun. Or that I just couldn't see it... at all.
Posted by: Jenna | April 12, 2006 5:27 PM
I appreciate the corrections about the comments I offered on my timeline. It's true: evolution is a fact. I have rewritten those comments and hopefully clarified the distinction between evolution and the theory behind it. I was in a hurry; maybe I'll improve those comments further.
Posted by: Steve | April 12, 2006 5:48 PM
I know this isn't a sexy cephalopod fact (and I know that Steve is building on another's data), but I'm a bit confused to see Ramapithecus in the timeline. That genus has been done away with as it reflects a quite distant time when we thought that humans would have diverged from apes much, much earlier. The fossils have been reassigned to Sivapithecus, which is considered to be the orangutan ancestor. On a similar note, the "Chimp and Human lineages" diverge is put at a point nearly 15 million years too early.
But carry on, I know none of you even believes in mammals, let alone stinky hominids.
Posted by: CMD | April 12, 2006 6:06 PM
My mouse pad wasn't wide enough to get me out of Prokaryotes:(
Posted by: Chris | April 12, 2006 6:40 PM
Chris: You need to purchase our double-wide mousepad add-on.
[/Dogbert]
Posted by: Jeremy | April 12, 2006 6:46 PM
My mouse pad wasn't wide enough to get me out of Prokaryotes:(
Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes, and little lambsy-divey.
Posted by: craig | April 12, 2006 6:52 PM
Thanks for the link -- I sent it to my (geology professor) father.
The space one is neat, too -- kind of scary how big the solar system is, but I'm weird that way. It needs some visible scale, though, since otherwise it's just click-click-click on the bar at the bottom with no reference points.
Posted by: Jan Andrea | April 12, 2006 8:31 PM
What I want to see is a tree of life with the time scale on the vertical, species branching out the way they do, and the thickness of each branch proportional to the biomass of each population.
Posted by: Mark | April 12, 2006 9:12 PM
Wow...that's really interesting. Thanks for the link!
It just goes to show you - as speciocentric as we are, we're less than the blink of an eye on the evolutionary timescale. I don't remember exactly what it was, but my biology professor once gave an analogy comparing the evolutionary timescale to a 24-hour day. As I recall, humans appeared about 12 seconds to midnight.
Posted by: FrancestheMagnificent | April 12, 2006 9:42 PM
Very nice. It reminds me of when I was in Boise ID. The Discovery center(?) I think. They have a solar system model walking tour. 1/2 meter sun at the center and then planets are scaled and set in plaques along the river trail. The earth is smaller than a pea and Pluto is just a dot on the plaque and is 1.5 miles away. They say the nearest star woud be in excess of 9,000 miles or about to the south pole. It sure puts things into perspective to make a pixel =30,000 yrs. No wonder I feel so old.
Posted by: James R | April 12, 2006 10:24 PM
How come I couldn't find PYGMYS and DWARFS on the chart?
It is a really cool chart, and really gives you a sense of how long mankind has been around; not very!
Posted by: aiabx | April 13, 2006 12:28 AM
There is another Solar-System walk in England, South of York, using the track of the abandoned main-line railway ( They built a new, higher-speed one to the West )
Better, still, at the South end of the walk is the Pub at the edge of the Solar System.
You may have to Google for references, since I've lost mine ....
Posted by: G. Tingey | April 13, 2006 2:58 AM
Of course, then there's the toilet paper timeline!
Posted by: Moody | April 13, 2006 4:49 AM
Nice... not sure about the (seeming) definition of eukaryotes as 'multicelled organisms' though - what does that make yeast?
Posted by: outeast | April 13, 2006 4:53 AM
PS: There's also this variation on the very wide Web-based timeline of earth's history, brought to you by the students who did the toilet paper example. Personally, I think they deserve more credit. Double-Plus Good: there are no lame disclaimers.
Posted by: Moody | April 13, 2006 4:59 AM
If a YEC made a timeline on a similar scale, it would only be about 600 microns in length!
Posted by: Jeebus | April 13, 2006 8:02 AM
"If a YEC made a timeline on a similar scale..."
Yes, and it, too, would be made out of toilet paper, but it would be used. And an ice-cube would be sitting on one end of it. And a nearby heat lamp would be trained on it. And -- sitting off to one side, with a sign above his head that read, "Intelligent Designer" -- completely oblivious, there would be an old man, snoring like thunder.
Posted by: Moody | April 13, 2006 8:37 AM
Apparently, the Creator procrastinated as much as I did in college, doing all the work at the last moment.
Posted by: Bruce | April 13, 2006 8:47 AM
The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has a very nice vertical to scale geologic timeline here.
Posted by: jimvj | April 13, 2006 10:28 AM
Ooops! Url disappeared (why?). This is it
http://www.naturalsciences.org/funstuff/paleo/timeline.html
Posted by: jimvj | April 13, 2006 10:44 AM
This is a good version of this idea. I'm thinking we need to set up a timeline like this in the hallway next year at BSU. One grouse: as usual, once you're past the eukaryote origins, the ages and main events are all about ANIMALS. Doesn't anybody ever remember that none of this happens without autotrophs?!?
Posted by: MarkF | April 13, 2006 10:44 AM
@ Bruce - I don't think the Creator was goofing-off, e.g. It was pretty productive during the Cambrian explosion.
@ MarkF - autotrophs?!? Sorry, I don't remember them, but then, I studied zoology in college.
Posted by: Steve | April 13, 2006 11:14 AM
It's kinda funny when some avid supporters say "it's not a fact". What does that tell ya? It tells me that a few people are smart enough to know the difference.
Posted by: Hooter | April 13, 2006 11:14 AM
I'm also a bit curious about how the different sorts of plants would fit on there. (Here's a rolled up newspaper you people can use on me in case "autotrophs" is a fancy word for "plants")
Didn't grass originate after the dinosaurs, or something like that?
Posted by: BronzeDog | April 13, 2006 11:44 AM
@Steve: "MarkF - autotrophs?!?"
Sorry. Basically, I meant plants. I use the fancy word autotrophs (organisms that manufacture their own food from physical energy sources) to cover the fact that the so-called "algae" are about as related to other things that people call plants as they are to fungi and multicellular animals.
As of an hour ago, Dann Siems and I are working on a proposal to place a physical time line, from 4.5 b.y. to the present, in the main hallway of Sattgast Hall on the Bemidji State University campus. We have around 50 meters to play with. Tentative design: the line is painted on the floor, with time intervals labeled on the wall at the edge of the floor, and we put up plexiglas fronted signs (easily moved and changed - scientific knowledge is tentative and subject to revision, after all) to indicate major events in the earth's history. We want it in-your-face and obvious every single time anybody walks in the building. We have until May 1 to come up with a proposal to the BSU foundation. The timeline will, of course, include plants...
Posted by: MarkF | April 13, 2006 11:56 AM
It's a pity that they didn't use the results from molecular clock methods to to date the appearance of various groups of prokaryotes and early eukaryotes -- there's an unfortunate tendency among zoologists and botanists to assume that nothing interesting was going on prior to the development of multicellular life and charts like this one which just give one "prokaryotic" and later "eukaryotic" lineage tend to reinforce this misconception.
But on a lighter note, to follow up on craigs' doggerel -- I'd like to share a couple of definitions that I remember being told as an undergrad:
Prokaryote: The act of having your pizza delivered to your door.
Eukaryote: The act of bringing home the pizza yourself.
Posted by: Jonathan Badger | April 13, 2006 1:54 PM
Mark F;
That sounds like a great project. You could end your time line with a Hubble view into space and show our future. And you could also add an additional creationist line 6,000 yrs of their bibles history with corrections of what really happened. But terminate this timeline the way they say it will happen. Armeggedon, Nuclear war, death, pestilence, etc. Put a face to their claims.
Sounds like fun no matter what you come up with. Good luck.
Posted by: James R | April 13, 2006 1:55 PM