Living as we do in the present, it is difficult to visualize what has come before. The time of our parents seems immeasurably far in the past. The history of the previous several centuries is just words in a textbook. How then can we possibly grasp the time over which the earth has existed, and over which living creatures have come and gone? We present for you here a time-line of the history of the earth, from its formation out of the gas and dust of interstellar space, which culminated some 5 billion years ago, right up to the present. Even on this scale, the last million years is too narrow to see any detail; zooming in on that portion will expand the time-line so you can see it more clearly. Scroll to the right, and follow the history of life on earth ...

Click here to see the last million years (the red band).

In Chrome you can make the image larger by clicking on the three dots in the top right corner of the browser and choosing 'zoom'. Try 200%. The image above is an immense 12,926 pixels wide. That represents somewhere around ten to twenty screens in width, depending on your resolution. Apparently some browsers don't like images that big, so if you can't see the time-line, that's why. Right-click on the image, save it, and you can examine it off-line. It's only 34k. See how you can make this time-line with a roll of toilet paper! Main Page