Ocean Renegades!: Journey through the Paleozoic Era
4 They are true survivors having lived through countless mass extinctions changing and evolving to suit the constant fluctuations of the environment They should be cherished and honored by we humble mammals But they're boooooring Though maybe it'd help me appreciate these fish and things if I had more of a hands on learning experience Hands on you say They have a touch pool over there We could go pet some horseshoe crabs No no I mean if we saw their long dead and probably amazing ancestors They have a documentary on the evolution of fish There's a showing in ten minutes NO I mean we should go back in time again and see some cool animals
5 Hmm Ah what an excellent suggestion Come along young Ronnie We'll go back to the very origin of animals themselves We'll discover what the land was like before the dinosaurs The things I do to see ancient beasts When we last went back in time the farthest we traveled was 205 million years ago to the late Triassic
But life first evolved on Earth many many many years before that Earth came into being 4 5 billion years ago and life evolved not long after that around 3 8 billion years ago So first there was nothing then there were jellyfish To put that into a more understandable time frame if all of human existence about 200,000 years was condensed into just one hour of a day Earth first formed 946 days ago 2 YEARS That's two and a half years 1 YEAR Oh no jellyfish didn't come along until much later The first life was unicellular meaning organisms consisted of just one cell 3 4 BILLION YEARS AGO 2 YEARS In comparison there are probably around 37 2 trillion cells in the average human body A trillion is one million millions by the way That's a LOT WHOA The first life that had more than one cell didn't evolve for about another half billion years And that was stuff like jellyfish right Not quite They were more like little strings or balls of cells not nearly as complex as jellyfish 6
7 The first actual animals didn't evolve until about 640 million years ago or four and a half months on our calendar That means it took more than two years in our calendar days for animals to evolve after the dawn of life ALL OF EXISTENCE HUMAN 1 7 BILLION YEARS 1 YEAR
