Fayerweather Street School | Timeline of the Earth

History of Life on Earth

This fall, the students in Fayerweather Street School’s 5th & 6th grades studied the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s history. We learned about geological events, studied organisms that lived during the last 500 million years in science, and learned about hominids living in the Great Rift Valley in Social Studies. The plaques on this timeline display our research on a scale of 1 meter = 100 million years.

Local, Medford-based woodworker Jess Morgan created the wooden QR code plaques positioned around Fresh Pond.

Timeline Map

Precambrian

4.54 Billion Years Ago

Our solar system formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.

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4.40 Billion Years Ago

Earth's moon was formed when the earth was still a young molten planet.

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3.9 Billion Years Ago

Earth has cooled off enough to have a crust over its molten core. For millions of years asteroids pelted our planet and brought microscopic crystals of ice to Earth.

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3.5 Billion Years Ago

Microscopic life existed on earth. Cyanobacteria were creating oxygen through photosynthesis.

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650 Million Years Ago

For billions of years Earth's climate had been changing due to plate tectonics and microscopic life. Then we entered an ice age nicknamed Snowball Earth.

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Paleozoic

540 Million Years Ago

When Snowball Earth melted there was an explosion of evolution. A wide diversity of life developed in the oceans.

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480 Million Years Ago

Animal life in the ocean continued to diversify, while plant and fungal life on land started to get established.

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430 Million Years Ago

During this warm period many plants and animals thrived.

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390 Million Years Ago

Each animal was developing specialized features for hunting and avoiding being eaten.

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375 Million Years Ago

Tetrapods started to live on land.

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360 Million Years Ago

Fish, tetrapods, and invertebrates continue to evolve interesting features.

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330 Million Years Ago

Swamps with lush plants from this time period turned into the coal and oil reserves we are using today.

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300 Million Years Ago

Complex plant life created high oxygen levels. This allowed for giant insects to rule the air.

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280 Million Years Ago

The giant supercontinent of Pangea has formed with both deserts and ice caps. Plants and animals have to adapt to drier environment and a wider range of temperatures.

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255 Million Years Ago

On land both herbivores and carnivores have developed large bodies as they live in complex ecosystems.

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Permian Extinction

252 Million Years Ago

Volcanic activity and a depletion of oxygen in the oceans lead to the extinction of 75% of all life on the planet. (81% marine life and 70% of terrestrial)

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Mesozoic

200 Million Years Ago

After the Permian Extinction, reptiles quickly evolved to take over the land, oceans, and air. This is the age of the dinosaurs.

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150 Million Years Ago

During this period Pangea pulled apart and our current continents started to form, and alongside the dinosaurs are first mammals and many other species that still exist today.

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100 Million Years Ago

This was a wam period for our planet. Flowering plants and pollinators evolved during this time.

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80 Million Years Ago

Due to the warm climate sea levels were high. Shallow seas covered what is dry land today.

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70 Million Years Ago

Dinosaurs were the dominant animal life on all seven continents.

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KT Extinction

66 Million Years Ago

When a giant asteroid hit Earth it created a world-wide extinction that took place in a matter of hours. The impact sent rock vapor into space. The vapor cooled and returned to the planet as tiny shards of glass. The friction of these shards reentering the atmosphere caused temperatures to spike dangerously hot.

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Cenozoic

60 Million Years Ago

Life evolved in the niches left open by the K-T extinction.

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50 Million Years Ago

As the continents separated, each ecosystem became distinct.

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40 Million Years Ago

Many interesting animals of this time period are no longer alive today, but we can see similarities to modern animals in their body structures.

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30 Million Years Ago

Evolution was also spurred on by a climate that cycled between global warming and ice ages.

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20 Million Years Ago

Ocean life was also interesting during this time period.

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4.5 Million Years Ago

There are many branches of our family tree.

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4.0 Million Years Ago

Many of our earliest hominin ancestors lived in the Great Rift Valley of Africa.

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3.5 Million Years Ago

This is the time period when our ancestors became bipedal.

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2.0 Million Years Ago

As the last ice age impacted the planet our ancestors in the genus Homo continued to evolve in Africa.

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1.5 Million Years Ago

Some of our evolutionary cousins evolved alongside our ancestors, but their lineage did not survive. "Paranthropus" means "alongside humans"

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1.0 Million Years Ago

As our ancestors left Africa, they interacted with a variety of other animals.

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500,000 Years Ago

Many hominins were established throughout the Europe and Asia before our species, Homo sapiens, even existed.

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100,000 Years Ago

Our species Homo sapiens has been on our planet for only a tiny portion of our planet's history. Yet our impact on our planet is so great we call today's time period Anthropocene -- or the epoch where human activity is having the greatest influence on climate and environment.

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