• Adding Time
• How we know what happened when
  • Radiometric dating
  • Stratigraphy
  • Molecular clocks
• Important events in the history of life
  • Origins of life
  • How did life originate?
  • Looking for the oldest fossils
  • Studying the origin of life
  • Human evolution

Adding Time

If you wanted to squeeze the 3.5 billion years of the history of life on Earth into a single minute, you would have to wait about 50 seconds for multicellular life to evolve, another four seconds for vertebrates to invade the land, and another four seconds for flowers to evolve—and only in the last 0.002 seconds would “modern” humans arise.

Biologists often represent time on phylogenies by drawing the branch lengths in proportion to the amount of time that has passed since that lineage arose. If the tree of life were drawn in this way, it would have a very long trunk indeed before it reached the first plant and animal branches.

The following phylogeny represents vertebrate evolution—just a small clade on the tree of life. The lengths of the branches have been adjusted to show when lineages split and went extinct.