One of the best ways to appreciate not only how long life has had to evolve, but also how short the period has been since “modern life” (aka birds, mammals, and humans) arose is to look at an evolutionary “timeline” that is drawn to scale. In the footnotes of WEIT I direct readers to one of these, but I have since found a much better one on the Web. It was constructed by John Kyrk, and is seen here. It’s a great teaching tool, with nice graphics, including eight telescoping timelines, each one a small piece of the previous one.
A really cool evolutionary timeline
January 28, 2009 • 11:14 am
Thanks for the wonderful link. That is a fascinating depiction — and a brilliant use of technology to illustrate a powerful concept.
You saw that first in the Z-letter!
Yes indeed. Let me add right away that many of the things I find out about new developments in evolution come from my friend Dr. Matthew Cobb at the University of Manchester, UK, who publishes a wonderful “Z (zoology)-letter” each week for his undergraduate students. If anybody is interested in getting this, which is chock full of really cool stuff about animals and evolution, look up his email address at Manchester Univ and ask to be put on his mailing list.
Wow, wonderful work!
Thank you so much for the link!
Not just the evolution timeline is great. Check of the sections on cell metabolism. If that’s not enough how about some info on how a virus invade a cells.