Another timeline


Here’s an interactive timeline that has it all: animated critters go strolling across the screen, there is a graph of oxygen concentration, and you can watch the continents slip and slide around the globe as you drag an arrow around the timeline. You’ll want a big monitor to display this on—it gets cluttered at times.

Comments

  1. Mike Fox says

    Someone hasn’t heard of logrithmic scales… (yeah, I’m a cynic – but it’s Monday)

  2. Scott Belyea says

    Very nice. However, I notice that it uses labels such as “Age of Mammals.” I’d thought that such labels had fallen out of fashion these days as being overly simplistic and potentially (or actually) misleading.

  3. Kristjan Wager says

    It doesn’t work for me. Annoying. I will see if I can get it to work when I’m at work tomorrow.

  4. Pierce R. Butler says

    The link given produces only a black page with a small gray bar and no options for clicking, scrolling, etc, using any of three browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari) on my Mac. :-P

  5. says

    I got the same thing Pierce did. I got a little bit of activity by right-clicking and repeatedly pressing “Forward,” but then I only got the animated critters and the map, without the text, arrow, or oxygen concentrations.

  6. says

    Only one quibble: it claims the “first fossils” appear at the beginning of the Cambrian. What are we supposed to call the pre-Cambrian impressions in rock left by soft-bodied organisms? There are filaments of blue-green algae preserved in rock from 3.5 billion years ago.

  7. says

    I’ve heard from others that have had trouble with this particular flash video that updating to the latest version manually at Macromedia’s site may help.
    That being said, it didn’t help me. I still just see the same black screen that Pierce describes (Ubuntu/Firefox)

  8. Roy S says

    I’ve heard from others that have had trouble with this particular flash video that updating to the latest version manually at Macromedia’s site may help.
    That being said, it didn’t help me. I still just see the same black screen that Pierce describes (Ubuntu/Firefox)

    Your problem may be that the latest version of Flash (8) is later than the latest version of Flash for Linux (7) – and in general Flash 7 will open Flash 8 files but may not render them correctly. I don’t know that this site is such an offender, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

  9. ben says

    There’s a little red arrow slider on the left side of the screen. You can drag it with the mouse. It’s easy to miss if you don’t have a BIG monitor; that’s probably the trouble most of you are having.

  10. says

    It claims mitochondria developed from chloroplasts. Ugh.

    It also goes by the false prokaryote/eukaryote division, rather than deal with the early origins of the three domains.

  11. says

    I think the atmospheric oxygen concentration graph may be out of date as well. A couple of months ago I read in Science News that said that it had been as high as 30 something percent during the Permian? (I think) anyway when there were big-ass dragonflies.