Deep Time — the whole history of Earth, at true scale

a fist-sized slice of stony meteorite, cut and polished flat: a dark grey matrix studded with a scatter of pale chalky-white, irregular rounded blobs a centimetre or two across — 4,567 million years ago The Solar System forms Dust and ice collapse around a new star. Nothing older has ever been dated.

a ball of liquid rock, glowing orange-red, brighter yellow-white cracks, a few darker cooling crusts floating on it — 4,540 million years ago Earth reaches full size Accretion finishes. The whole surface is molten rock.

a small sphere of molten rock hanging alone against black, dull orange-red overall with brighter cracks of yellow-white light breaking through its surface — at least 4,510 million years ago The Moon is torn out A Mars-sized body strikes, at least 4.51 billion years ago. The debris becomes a Moon that hangs enormous and close.

The Moon is two and a half times wider than it is today

one tiny gem-like crystal shown much larger than life, reddish-brown and translucent, a slender six-sided prism with pointed pyramidal ends, alone against black — 4,404 million years ago Liquid water A single zircon crystal records water at the surface.

a single pitted, etched volcanic rock in mid-toned warm grey and rust, its pits shown as shallow dents a shade or two darker than the surface, with pale streaks of rain running down its face — 4,300 million years ago Steam and acid rain The air is CO₂. The rain is acid. There is nothing yet you would call land.

a hand-sized slab of grey-beige banded rock, its bands running in soft parallel waves, with a scatter of small dark purple-red garnet flecks caught in the pale bands — at least 4,160 million years ago The oldest surviving crust Nuvvuagittuq, Quebec — a scrap of the first ocean floor.

a hand-sized slab of streaky rock, straight alternating bands of pale pinkish-grey and darker brownish-grey, with a few small red garnet flecks — 4,031 million years ago The oldest rock we still have Acasta gneiss, north-west Canada. The Hadean ends here because this is where the record starts.

a hand-sized slab of fine-grained rock split along its bedding, showing dozens of thin, slightly wavy parallel layers stacked like the pages of a closed book, pale grey-green throughout — 3,800 million years ago The oldest sedimentary rocks Isua, Greenland — mud, laid down under water, by a real ocean.

the same pale grey-green layered rock as the Isua sediment beside it on this page — a cool sage grey-green overall, with no warm buff or brown in it — scattered with dull mid-grey graphite flecks — short angular slivers and smears lying along the layering, like pencil lead rubbed into stone, never round bubbles or holes — 3,700 million years ago The first trace of life Isotopically light carbon in Isua sediment. Not a fossil — a chemical shadow, and the oldest one anyone accepts.

a broad, low, wrinkled sheet lying flat on sediment, like the crumpled skin on cooled paint — a deep olive-green overall, its margins flushed dull pink-purple where the sulfur-bacteria layer beneath shows through, puckered into ridges and shallow domes a few centimetres across — 3,600 million years ago Microbial mats Life is a film on the seabed, and stays that way for three billion years.

a rounded, layered mound of banded rock, like a stack of thin stone plates or a cross-section of a cabbage — 3,480 million years ago Stromatolites Mats build the first structures life leaves behind. Whether these particular ones did is still argued.

a cluster of tiny rod- and sphere-shaped cells at high magnification, translucent pale yellow-green, each scattered with vivid lemon-yellow sulfur granules inside it like mustard seeds suspended in glass — the whole cluster reads as a bright clean lemon-yellow — 3,400 million years ago Microbes that eat sulfur No oxygen, no sunlight needed — chemistry alone.

one irregular rock tumbling alone, clearly longer than it is wide like a potato or a peanut rather than a ball, pitted all over with shallow overlapping craters like Phobos, a cool neutral blue-grey throughout with no warm brown or tan in it — 3,260 million years ago A fifty-kilometre asteroid The S2 impact — 50 to 200 times the mass of the one that killed the dinosaurs. It boils the top of the ocean, and life gets better.

a hand-sized block of coarse granite, dominantly a warm salmon-pink from its large blocky feldspar crystals — angular interlocking grains of clearly different sizes, jammed against one another rather than evenly-spaced round dots — set with glassy grey quartz and small pale mica flecks; the light, buoyant rock continents are made of — 3,220 million years ago The first continents Cratons stabilise. There is now permanent dry land.

a single gently curved filament of cells strung end to end like a string of beads inside a clear sheath, each cell a rounded cylinder, the whole filament a strong blue-green teal — 3,000 to 2,400 million years ago Photosynthesis Cyanobacteria split water and let the oxygen go. It will take 600 million years to matter.

a broken block of diamictite the colour of wet slate — sharp-cornered pebbles of many different sizes jammed at all angles into a fine stony matrix, like fruitcake turned to stone — with one flat face bearing straight parallel scratches where ice dragged it across bedrock; the whole rock a cold blue-grey with no warm brown in it — 2,900 million years ago The first ice age The Pongola glaciation. Ice at mid-latitudes, on a planet with no oxygen.

a loose drifting raft of many filaments lying across one another in a flat open layer, each filament plainly made of rounded cells stacked end to end like a string of beads with the separate cells clearly visible, the whole raft a deep blue-green teal — the same colour and the same beaded strands as the single filament earlier on this page — 2,800 million years ago Cyanobacteria, everywhere Still no free oxygen in the air — the rock is drinking all of it.

a cluster of small bubbles rising off a mat of green scum, like carbonation — 2,700 million years ago Whiffs of oxygen Oxygen appears in patches, hundreds of millions of years before the air changes.

The sky flickers orange and back, three to five times

a cut block of banded iron formation standing on end, crossed by dozens of narrow wavy parallel bands — deep brick-red and maroon jasper alternating with silver-grey iron layers, the bands gently folded, varying in thickness, some pinching out and some swelling; the dominant colour is a deep brick-red — 2,600 million years ago Banded iron Oxygen meets dissolved iron and it rusts out of the sea, in bands, for a billion years.

the same banded iron formation as earlier on this page, drawn as a broader, thicker slab — many more red-and-silver bands stacked across it, the layering denser and the folding tighter; the dominant colour is again a deep brick-red — 2,500 million years ago Banded iron, still Still rusting out of the sea. It has been a hundred million years.

smooth and featureless like Titan, thick orange-tan haze, faint soft banding, no continents or oceans visible — 2,430 million years ago The Great Oxidation begins Free oxygen floods the air and poisons most of the life that made it.

a single dark slate-grey boulder half-buried in fine layered pale grey-green mud, punched down into it so the layers directly beneath are pushed into a deep U-shaped sag under its weight while the layers above drape up and over it — a dropstone, the signature of ice rafting; the dominant colour is a cool grey-green, with no warm buff or orange anywhere in it — 2,400 million years ago The Huronian glaciation Oxygen destroys the methane greenhouse and the planet freezes, three times over.

The sky is blue

a rust-red rock slab seen close, with a crack of open blue sky at the top — 2,220 million years ago The Great Oxidation ends Oxygen is permanent. The haze never comes back.

several flat, lobed, coin-sized discs on a slab of cool slate-grey mudstone with a faint violet cast, each disc a pale pyritic cream with a wrinkled, crumpled raised rim and a smoother middle, its outline irregular and lobed like a blob of dried wax pressed into the rock; the dominant colour is a cool violet-grey, never buff or brown — 2,100 million years ago Francevillian structures — identity disputed Centimetre-scale shapes in Gabon. Possibly the oldest multicellular life; possibly not life at all.

Oxygen falls back

a single flat ribbon lying on an unbanded slab of dark rust-red iron-rich rock as one large open ring, like a rubber band or a loop of tape dropped flat on a table — a wide empty circle of bare rock in the middle of the loop, one end of the ribbon visibly stopping short and lapping past the other so it reads as a length of ribbon rather than a closed circle, the loop slightly uneven the way a dropped band lies rather than a perfect machined circle, the ribbon exactly the same width from one end to the other — a flat matte pewter-grey film pressed into the face of the rock and flush with it, stained into the stone rather than sitting on it — 1,870 million years ago Grypania — identity disputed A coiled ribbon in Michigan iron. Big enough to see, but nothing of its cells survives.

Banded iron stops

a short straight filament of seven or eight large box-shaped cells joined end to end like the carriages of a train, each cell a translucent fresh grass-green and far chunkier than a bacterium, holding one softly-defined rounded body inside it — 1,635 million years ago The first complex cells Qingshania — cells with a nucleus, stuck together on purpose.

a short upright tuft of red alga in a deep saturated wine-red, almost purple: a single unbranched filament of stacked disc-shaped cells, like a narrow pile of coins, anchored at its base by a small holdfast — 1,047 million years ago Sex Bangiomorpha, a red alga. The oldest known sexual reproduction.

a specimen of folded gneiss — a banded rock whose pink, grey and pale mineral stripes are bent into tight parallel folds, as if the layers had been squeezed from both sides — 1,000 million years ago Rodinia Every continent, gathered into one mass.

a lump of warm honey-cream reef limestone sliced open on one flat cut face, and that whole cut face filled edge to edge with a dense fine mesh of hundreds of thin rust-orange worm-like tubes, tangled and winding at every angle and far too many to count — the vermicular texture inside a bath sponge, or a plate of tangled thread — 890 million years ago The first sponges — identity disputed Sponge-like structures in Canadian reef rock, 300 million years before any agreed animal.

The Boring Billion ends

ice pole to pole, pale blue-grey fracture lines like cracked porcelain, a few small bare rock patches near the middle — 717 million years ago Snowball Earth Ice reaches the tropics. The Sturtian lasts 56 million years.

a slab of cool pale grey-cream limestone with a faint blue cast, in fine even layers, its top surface crossed by low rounded parallel ripples like ripples in wet sand, never a zigzag or chevron pattern, sitting sharply on a rougher darker rock beneath — the boundary between the two flat and abrupt; the dominant colour is a cool pale grey-cream, never a warm buff or honey — 661 million years ago The ice retreats Cap carbonate, laid down in a few thousand years on top of the ice.

a broken block of dark slate blue-grey glacial diamictite whose top half gives way to smooth even meltwater-laid bedding in pale ice-blue — jumbled sharp-cornered pebbles of all sizes jammed in at every angle below, quiet flat layers above, with a clean line between them — 635 million years ago The ice breaks for good A second freeze, the Marinoan — perhaps only four million years — and then it is over. The Ediacaran begins.

a frond like a fern or chestnut leaf, branching ridges repeating as smaller copies of themselves down its length, rooted to the seabed by a small disc — 574 million years ago Charnia The first big bodies — soft, strange, rooted to the seabed.

a trilobite seen from directly above: a flat oval shield divided lengthwise into three lobes, a broad crescent head with a raised ridge running down its middle and one crescent eye on the cheek either side of that ridge, a jointed thorax of repeated segments, and a small tail plate, the whole shield a deep violet-blue with pale cream margins along its rim — 538.8 million years ago The Cambrian begins Shells, eyes, guts, predators, and the first things burrowing through mud on purpose.

a flattened, segmented swimmer with rows of side fins like a shrimp, two large stalked eyes, two long spiny grasping arms held out in front like a pair of curved combs, and underneath the head a small circular ring of overlapping plates, like a camera aperture, as its mouth — 508 million years ago The Burgess Shale Anomalocaris — a metre of segmented predator, with the first real eyes.

a flat microscope slide view of a cryptospore tetrad in transmitted light: four thin-walled circles overlapping in a clover, drawn flat with no volume and no roundness at all, their walls a fine darker amber line that thickens where the four press together, their interiors a pale washed translucent amber you can see straight through, the whole group finely stippled like frosted glass — 470 million years ago Plants reach land Spores, nothing you could call a plant yet. Land has been bare for four billion years.

several graptolite fossils fanning out from one point on a neutral pale grey shale slab with no warm or brown cast — each a narrow straight strip edged with fine regular teeth, like the blade of a hacksaw flattened into the rock, the fossil film a silvery mid-grey against the paler slab — 445 million years ago The Late Ordovician extinction Ice, then anoxia. About 85% of species go.

a few centimetres of forking, leafless green stems, splitting into two even branches again and again, with small rounded capsules at the branch tips — 420 million years ago Cooksonia The first plants with stems. A few centimetres tall, and the tallest thing alive.

a coelacanth seen from directly overhead, lying flat on a stream bed and looked straight down upon from above: the same heavy scales, the same broad three-lobed tail, the same deep steel-blue mottled with pale blue-white flecks, and a pair of thick fleshy-based front fins spread out to either side, each ending in a fan of stiff fin-rays — and at the front, instead of an ordinary fish head, a broad flat spade much wider than the body, with both eyes sitting up on the flat top surface of it near the middle, looking straight up out of the picture at the viewer — 375 million years ago Tiktaalik A fish with a neck, and wrists.

a giant dragonfly, long segmented body, two pairs of long net-veined wings held flat to the sides — 320 million years ago The coal forests Trees 40 metres tall, in swamps that become every coal seam on Earth. The air is 30% oxygen and the dragonflies are 70 cm across.

a lizard-like animal with a tall sail of skin down its back, held up by long spines — 295 million years ago Dimetrodon Not a dinosaur. A synapsid — our own branch, 60 million years before the first dinosaur.

a thick slab of flood-basalt crust broken open, its top a ropy wrinkled skin in a cool pewter-grey, buckled into coils and folds like thick rope laid side by side or the skin on cooled porridge, with a narrow orange glow showing only in the deep cracks between the crusted plates — 251.9 million years ago The Great Dying Siberian basalt cooks the ocean. 81% of marine species die, in about 60,000 years — one and a half pixels.

two small animals side by side at the same scale, overlapping slightly so they read as one group: a slender bipedal dinosaur in muted sage-olive green with a cream underside, on long hind legs with its tail held level behind it, and beside it a shrew-sized furry mammal in warm sandy cream, on four legs with a long pointed snout — 233 to 225 million years ago The first dinosaurs, and the first mammals Both lines appear inside the same eight million years. At this scale, the same moment.

a phytosaur — a long low four-legged reptile whose snout is drawn out into a slender straight rod lined with small teeth, ending in a smooth solid rounded tip like the blunt end of a wooden spoon handle; set on top of the skull, directly between and just in front of the eyes, is a raised dome like a small volcano, and the two nostril openings sit on the summit of that dome, far back from the snout; four short legs, a long heavy tail, and a warm sandy bronze hide with soft darker bronze banding along the back; the eye is a small amber bead — 201.4 million years ago The Triassic–Jurassic extinction The Atlantic starts to open. Half of everything dies, and the dinosaurs inherit it.

a raven-sized dinosaur-like animal with sharp teeth in its jaws, a long bony tail trailing straight out behind with feathers running down either side of it, and broad rounded feathered wings — its plumage a deep iridescent blue-green shot with violet, like the sheen on a magpie's wing, with pale cream bars across the flight feathers — 150 million years ago Archaeopteryx Feathers, and the first wing that works.

a slender aquatic stem in bright fresh yellow-green with finely divided feathery leaves, carrying along its upper length a row of small paired seed pods and bare stamens attached directly to the stem, with no petals anywhere — 125 million years ago The first flowers Archaefructus: no petals yet, but a flower — the oldest anyone can date. Before this, nothing was in bloom.

a huge two-legged predator held horizontal like a see-saw balanced over its hips — spine level, a long tail carried straight out behind as a counterweight — thick and deep where it leaves the hips, tapering only gradually, never a thin whip — and a short deep S-curved neck carrying a massive blunt boxy head as long as the animal's own thigh, as deep from skull-top to jaw as a bathtub is deep, broad across the snout, its jaws slightly parted on thick conical teeth; the forelimbs are tiny and held to the chest, each ending in a simple two-pronged pincer like a pair of tongs, and the hind legs are thick and bird-like with three forward-facing toes; the animal is a muted slate-grey with dark rust-red banding down its back and flanks and a pale cream underside — 68 to 66 million years ago Tyrannosaurus rex The last and largest of the tyrannosaurs, gone within two million years of the asteroid.

the whole Earth as a disc, most of it under heavy swirling white and grey-brown storm cloud and dust, one brilliant white-hot flash and an expanding pale ring spreading from a single point, with only broken fragments of green land and blue ocean showing through the gaps — 66.04 million years ago Chicxulub Everything larger than a badger dies.

a small squirrel-sized animal gripping a branch, its hands and feet wrapped right around it, with a narrow pointed furry muzzle like a squirrel's, a small rounded head, large forward-facing eyes, short soft fur in a warm chestnut-red with a cream belly, and a long slender tail held out for balance — 56 million years ago The first true primates Teilhardina — not the primate-like mammals that came before it, but the first crown primate. It appears on three continents within 25,000 years, during a sudden burst of global heat.

a slab of ice calving off a dark rock cliff into the sea — 33.9 million years ago Antarctica freezes The greenhouse world ends. The modern icehouse begins.

a single ape skull in three-quarter view, warm ivory bone-cream throughout: a low rounded braincase, a heavy continuous brow ridge above the eyes, a short flat face and a broad palate of small worn teeth — 9.3 to 6.5 million years ago The human line splits from the chimpanzees Everything you would call human happens after this point — the next 175 pixels.

4,567 million years ago The Solar System forms
4,540 million years ago Earth reaches full size
4,510 million years ago The Moon is torn out
4,404 million years ago Liquid water
4,031 million years ago The oldest rock we still have
3,700 million years ago The first trace of life
3,480 million years ago Stromatolites
3,260 million years ago A fifty-kilometre asteroid
3,000 million years ago Photosynthesis
2,900 million years ago The first ice age
2,430 million years ago The Great Oxidation begins
2,400 million years ago The Huronian glaciation
2,220 million years ago The Great Oxidation ends
1,635 million years ago The first complex cells
1,047 million years ago Sex
1,000 million years ago Rodinia
717 million years ago Snowball Earth
635 million years ago The ice breaks for good
574 million years ago Charnia
538.8 million years ago The Cambrian begins
470 million years ago Plants reach land
445 million years ago The Late Ordovician extinction
375 million years ago Tiktaalik
251.9 million years ago The Great Dying
227 million years ago The first dinosaurs, and the first mammals
201.4 million years ago The Triassic–Jurassic extinction
125 million years ago The first flowers
66.04 million years ago Chicxulub
33.9 million years ago Antarctica freezes
7 million years ago The human line splits from the chimpanzees
4.4 million years ago Ardipithecus walks upright
3.3 million years ago The first stone tools
2.8 million years ago The first Homo
1.9 million years ago Homo erectus
about 800 thousand years ago Fire, kept
300 thousand years ago Homo sapiens
51.2 thousand years ago The oldest known picture
12 thousand years ago Farming
5.4 thousand years ago Writing
250 years ago The industrial revolution

The last ten happened in the final 110 of 115,000 pixels. Everything humans have farmed, written, built or remembered is the last three tenths of one pixel.

Two things on this page came within a rule of being cut. Tyrannosaurus rex sits 49 pixels from the asteroid; the first primates sit 251 — both closer than the 600-pixel floor allows anywhere else on this page, and both stayed anyway.