Set Your Watch: Life on Earth to Scale

Life_scale_400

Link: Set Your Watch. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future.

This image came out a couple months ago in Nature, but I just came across it today. I quite like the way it sums up the history of life–something that’s maddening hard to do, since the time scales are so vast. It shows how life’s diversity has been accumulating for billions of years. This chart shows the timing of the earliest paeolontological evidence for different kinds of life, ranging from fossils to chemical markers.