A Brief History of the Earth

600 million years of life

 17th century interest in natural science. Horizontality, uniformity, faunal succession

Biostratigraphy enabled relative time sequence

Carboniferous. Cambrian. Silurian, etc.

Age of Earth?
Rates of Sedimentation. Up to 3 billion years Salt content of Ocean 70 million years

Cooling of Sun and Earth 20 to 400 million years

Radiometric Dating
Kept getting older ages for earth.

Meteorites. 4.5 Billion(Ga) years old

Acasta Gneiss near Great Slave Lake, N.W.T. 4.03 Billion years old

Rocks from western Greenland. 3.7-3.8 Billion Years

Northern Michigan. 3.5-3.7 Billion Years Rocks found in Grand Canyon. 2 Billion years old. Recently found some mineral grains in west-central Australia. 4.4 Billion years

 Cambrian Age of Invertabrates. Burgess Shale near Field, B.C. 509 ma

Recent discoveries of microfossils as old as 3.5 Billion Years. Stromatolites still around Ordovician Age of Invertabrates. Height of Trilobites First Fishes
Silurian First Plants

 Devonian Age of Fishes First Insects Carboniferous Large Coal Swamps First Reptiles Permian MASS EXTICTIOIN at end of Permian ~90% of marine life. ~75% of land life

Trilobites die out after almost 300 million years

Age of Reptiles
Triassic Dinosuars dominate Jurassic First Birds Cretaceous First flowering plants 130 ma feathered dinosaur found in China 90 ma feathered dinosaur found in New New Mexico

Age of Mammals
Tertiary Cretaceuous-Tertiary Extinction.

Chicxulub crater discovered in early 90s

Quaternary Humans Develop First Human species(Homo genus) ~ 1.6-2 ma First Homo Sapien ~300-500,000 years ago

600 million years ago Precambrian

Supercontinent of Rodinia

530 million years ago Early Cambrian

430 million years Silurian

400 million years Early Devonian

340 million years Early Carboniferous

240 million years Early Triassic

220 million years Late Triassic

200 million years Early Jurassic

150 million years Late Jurassic

60 million years Early Tertiary

50 Thousand years Pleistocene(Quaternary)

50 Thousand years Pleistocene(Quaternary)