Earth Timeline

Walk along 4.54 billion years of history in our timeline exhibit, and get a close-up view of the last 500 million years.

Earth’s 4.54 billion-year history is represented as a horizontal line over 30 metres long. To trace this history, walk along the timeline, with each step taking you 100 million years backwards in time. How many steps is it to where animals first appeared? How many steps before you reach the first signs of life on Earth? Visit this exhibit and find out.

Many of the organisms in our museum belong to groups that appeared during the last 500 million years, and a more detailed view of this time period is shown in another exhibit. This burst of biodiversity included the emergence of winged insects, flowering plants, and mammals, like us. How many of these organisms do you recognize? Can you find some of them in the museum?

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