Some Important Dates in the History of the Earth
| Years Ago |
Event |
| 4,600,000,000 |
Origin of the Earth |
| 3,900,000,000 |
Oldest Dated Crustal Rocks |
| 3,800,000,000 |
Oldest Evidence for Life |
| 2,000,000,000 |
First Oxygen Atmosphere/Ozone Layer Forms |
| 900,000,000 |
Oldest Metazoan Fossils |
| 510,000,000 |
Oldest Fossil Fish |
| 458,000,000 |
First Land Plants |
| 375,000,000 |
That important first step:Amphibians Evolve |
| 245,000,000 |
Huge Mass Extinction at End of Permian Period /
Close of the Paleozoic Era |
| 200,000,000 |
First Mammals |
| 160,000,000 |
First Birds |
| 145,000,000 |
Atlantic Ocean first opens |
| 130,000,000 |
Angiosperms (Flowering Plants) on the Scene |
| 65,000,000 |
Adaptive Radiation of Mammals
Dinosaurs Go Extinct
Close of the Mesozoic Era/ Beginning
of the Cenozoic Era |
| 3,400,000 |
New discoveries of Australopithecus afarensis
(Lucy) fossils from Ethiopia |
| 2,000,000 |
Pleistocene Ice Age begins
Light from the Andromeda galaxy seen today
left Andromeda |
| 600,000 |
Age of Homo erectus fossils from Ethiopia |
| 125,000 |
Oldest rocks in the Bahamas |
| 100,000 |
Homo sapiens appears in the fossil record |
| 15,000 |
Last ice sheet retreats from northern United States |
| 7,000 |
Grahams Harbor, San Salvador, Bahamas floods
due to rising sea level after ice sheets
are reduced to modern day volume |
| 506 |
Columbus lands in New World |
| ? |
You were born |
|