Natural history & deep time timeline
The story of the universe, the Earth and life on it, from the Big Bang onwards.
152 events, oldest first.
Timeline of Natural history & deep time
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c. 13.8 billion years ago
The Big Bang
Its afterglow still reaches us as a faint microwave hiss across the whole sky.
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c. 4.6 billion years ago
The Sun forms
It is roughly halfway through its life.
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c. 4.54 billion years ago
Earth forms
That is roughly a third of the age of the universe.
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c. 4.5 billion years ago
The Moon forms
It probably formed from debris after a Mars-sized body hit the young Earth.
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c. 3.5 billion years ago
Microbes build the first stromatolites
Stromatolites, layered mounds built by microbes, still grow in Western Australia.
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c. 2.4 billion years ago
Oxygen first builds up in the atmosphere
It was produced by cyanobacteria, and it poisoned much of the life that existed then.
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c. 700 million years ago
Ice may cover the whole Earth in 'Snowball Earth'
Ice may have reached all the way to the equator.
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c. 570 million years ago
Strange Ediacaran creatures fill the seas
Some looked like quilted fronds and are hard to link to any animals alive today.
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c. 538 million years ago
The Cambrian explosion of animal life
Most major animal groups appear in the fossil record within a few tens of millions of years.
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c. 508 million years ago
The Burgess Shale animals live
Its bizarre fossils include Opabinia, an animal with five eyes.
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c. 470 million years ago
The first land plants appear
They were tiny, moss-like plants without roots or leaves.
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c. 450 million years ago
The first sharks swim the oceans
Early sharks are known mostly from fossil scales, because cartilage skeletons rarely fossilise.
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c. 430 million years ago
The first jawed fish appear
Jaws evolved from the bony arches that support fish gills.
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c. 385 million years ago
The first trees grow
Early trees like Wattieza reproduced with spores rather than seeds.
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c. 380 million years ago
Dunkleosteus hunts in the seas
This armoured fish had bony blades instead of teeth.
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c. 375 million years ago
Tiktaalik, a fish with limb-like fins, lives
It had a neck, unlike any fish before it, which helped it hunt in shallow water.
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c. 330 million years ago
Swampy forests lay down coal
Much of the world's coal formed from Carboniferous swamp forests.
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c. 312 million years ago
The first reptiles appear
Their tough-shelled eggs let them breed away from water.
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c. 300 million years ago
Giant dragonfly-like insects fly
Meganeura had a wingspan of about 70 cm, helped by oxygen-rich air.
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c. 280 million years ago
Dimetrodon roams the Earth
Despite its sail, it was not a dinosaur - it was more closely related to mammals.
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c. 252 million years ago
The Great Dying mass extinction
Around 90% of marine species vanished in the worst extinction in Earth's history.
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c. 230 million years ago
The first dinosaurs appear
For their first 30 million years, dinosaurs were mostly small and far from dominant.
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c. 225 million years ago
The first mammals appear
Early mammals were mostly small, nocturnal and shrew-like.
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c. 220 million years ago
Pterosaurs take to the air
They were the first animals with backbones to evolve powered flight.
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c. 200 million years ago
The supercontinent Pangaea begins to break up
The Atlantic Ocean it created is still widening by a few centimetres a year.
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c. 154 million years ago
Brachiosaurus roams North America
It held its long neck high, like a giraffe.
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c. 150 million years ago
Archaeopteryx lives
It had feathers and wings, but also teeth and a long bony tail.
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c. 150 million years ago
Stegosaurus roams the Earth
It lived in the Late Jurassic, around 80 million years before T. rex.
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c. 130 million years ago
The first flowering plants bloom
Stegosaurus had died out long before, so it probably never saw a flower.
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c. 95 million years ago
Spinosaurus hunts in North Africa
It may have spent much of its time hunting fish in rivers.
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c. 75 million years ago
Velociraptor roams Mongolia
The real Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey, and feathered.
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c. 70 million years ago
Mosasaurs rule the seas
These giant marine reptiles were related to snakes and monitor lizards.
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c. 68 million years ago
Triceratops roams North America
Triceratops and T. rex lived at the same time, in the same places.
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c. 68 million years ago
Tyrannosaurus rex roams the Earth
T. rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus.
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c. 66 million years ago
An asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs
Birds are descended from dinosaurs, so in a sense dinosaurs are still with us.
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c. 55 million years ago
The first horses appear
The earliest horses were only about the size of a fox.
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c. 50 million years ago
Early whale ancestors walk on land
Pakicetus, an early relative of whales, had four legs and lived by the water's edge.
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c. 50 million years ago
The Himalayas begin to rise
India is still pushing north, so Everest grows a few millimetres a year.
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c. 34 million years ago
Antarctica freezes over
Before then, forests grew on the continent.
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c. 25 million years ago
Lake Baikal begins to form
It is the world's oldest and deepest lake.
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c. 6 million years ago
The Grand Canyon begins to form
The canyon is young, but the oldest rocks in its walls are around 1.8 billion years old.
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c. 5.3 million years ago
The Atlantic floods back into the Mediterranean
After drying out, the sea may have refilled in less than two years.
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c. 5 million years ago
The first mammoths appear
The earliest mammoths lived in Africa.
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c. 3.6 million years ago
Megalodon goes extinct
The giant shark was perhaps three times the length of a great white.
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c. 3.3 million years ago
The first stone tools are made
They are older than our own genus, Homo.
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c. 3.2 million years ago
Lucy the Australopithecus lives
Her skeleton was nicknamed after the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'.
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c. 2.8 million years ago
The Isthmus of Panama joins the Americas
Animals then crossed between North and South America in a 'Great Interchange'.
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c. 2.3 million years ago
Homo habilis makes stone tools
Its name means 'handy man', because of the stone tools found with it.
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c. 2 million years ago
Homo erectus appears
It was the first human species to spread out of Africa.
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c. 1.5 million years ago
Turkana Boy lives in East Africa
His skeleton is one of the most complete early humans ever found.
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c. 640,000 years ago
The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts
The eruption scattered ash over much of North America.
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c. 300,000 years ago
Homo sapiens first appear
The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils were found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.
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c. 74,000 years ago
The Toba supervolcano erupts
It was one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the last two million years.
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c. 50,000 years ago
Meteor Crater is formed in Arizona
The crater is more than a kilometre wide.
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c. 45,500 years ago
A warty pig is painted in a Sulawesi cave
The Indonesian painting is one of the oldest known artworks of an animal.
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c. 45,000 years ago
Modern humans reach Europe
They shared the continent with Neanderthals for thousands of years.
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c. 40,000 years ago
Bone flutes are the oldest known instruments
Flutes carved from vulture bone and mammoth ivory were found in German caves.
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c. 40,000 years ago
Neanderthals die out
Most people with non-African ancestry still carry a little Neanderthal DNA.
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c. 36,000 years ago
Animals are painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave
Its walls show lions, rhinos and mammoths, drawn in charcoal and ochre.
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c. 30,000 years ago
The Venus of Willendorf is carved
The 11 cm figure was found in Austria in 1908.
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c. 20,000 years ago
Ice sheets reach their greatest extent
Sea levels were about 120 metres lower than they are today.
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c. 17,000 years ago
Aurochs are painted at Lascaux
The largest painted aurochs at Lascaux is more than 5 metres long.
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c. 11,700 years ago
The last Ice Age ends
It marks the start of the Holocene, the epoch we still live in.
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c. 10,000 years ago
Sabre-toothed cats die out
Smilodon's canine teeth could be more than 25 cm long.
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c. 8500 BC
Cattle are domesticated
All modern cattle may descend from as few as 80 wild aurochs tamed in the Near East.
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c. 6500 BC
Rising seas make Britain an island
People once walked from Britain to Europe across land that is now the North Sea.
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c. 6200 BC
The Storegga Slide triggers a huge tsunami
An underwater landslide off Norway sent waves crashing onto Scotland.
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c. 5700 BC
Mount Mazama erupts, forming Crater Lake
Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States.
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c. 3500 BC
The Sahara begins turning to desert
Rock art shows giraffes, hippos and cattle in what is now desert.
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c. 2800 BC
Methuselah, the oldest known living tree, sprouts
The bristlecone pine in California is still alive today.
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c. 2000 BC
The last woolly mammoths die out
A small population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, centuries after the Great Pyramid was built.
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c. 1600 BC
The Thera volcano erupts
The huge eruption may have inspired the legend of Atlantis.
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c. 1445
The moa is hunted to extinction
The largest of these flightless birds stood about 3.6 metres tall.
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1627
The last aurochs dies in Poland
The wild ancestor of all cattle survived until after Shakespeare's death.
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1662
The dodo is last sighted
It vanished less than a century after Dutch sailors first described it.
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1669
Mount Etna's lava reaches Catania
Men in wet cowhides tried to divert it with iron bars - the first recorded lava diversion attempt.
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1703
The Great Storm batters Britain
It wrecked the first Eddystone Lighthouse and killed its builder.
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1707
Mount Fuji last erupts
Its ash fell on Edo, about 100 km away.
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1755
The Lisbon earthquake
It struck on All Saints' Day and shook European thinkers' faith in a benevolent world.
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1759
Kew Gardens is founded
It now holds one of the largest collections of living plants in the world.
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1768
Steller's sea cow is hunted to extinction
It was wiped out just 27 years after Europeans first described it.
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1770
Europeans first describe the kangaroo
The name 'kangaroo' comes from the Guugu Yimithirr word 'gangurru'.
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1783
Iceland's Laki volcano erupts
Its toxic haze spread across Europe, and famine followed in Iceland.
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1799
The platypus is described by science
British scientists first suspected the specimen was a hoax stitched together.
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1811
The New Madrid earthquakes
They briefly made the Mississippi River appear to run backwards.
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1815
Mount Tambora erupts
It caused 1816's 'Year Without a Summer', when Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein.
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1823
Mary Anning finds a complete plesiosaur
Her finds were often credited to the wealthy men who bought them.
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1824
Megalosaurus becomes the first named dinosaur
William Buckland named it before the word 'dinosaur' even existed.
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1825
Iguanodon is named
Gideon Mantell thought its thumb spike was a horn on its nose.
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1828
London Zoo opens to scientists
It was the world's first scientific zoo; the public was admitted later.
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1833
The great Leonid meteor storm
So many meteors fell that some Americans thought the world was ending.
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1842
The word 'dinosaur' is coined
Richard Owen built it from Greek words meaning 'terrible lizard'.
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1844
The last great auks are killed
The great auk was the original 'penguin' - the southern birds were named after it.
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1847
The gorilla is scientifically described
It was described from skulls collected in Gabon by a missionary, Thomas Savage.
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1852
Augustus Dowd stumbles on California's giant sequoias
A felled giant's stump was later used as a dance floor.
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1854
The Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures are unveiled
A dinner party was held inside the mould of the Iguanodon.
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1859
Thomas Austin releases wild rabbits in Australia
He released 24 rabbits for hunting; their descendants numbered in the hundreds of millions.
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1859
The Carrington solar storm
Telegraph wires sparked, and auroras were seen as far south as the Caribbean.
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1864
Lincoln signs the Yosemite Grant
He protected Yosemite Valley in the middle of the Civil War.
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1868
The first dinosaur skeleton is mounted
Hadrosaurus went on display in Philadelphia, causing a sensation.
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1869
John Wesley Powell rafts through the Grand Canyon
Powell led the expedition despite having lost an arm in the Civil War.
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1869
The giant panda becomes known to Western science
French missionary Armand David sent a panda skin back to Paris.
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1870
Old Faithful is named
The geyser erupts roughly every hour or two.
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1872
Yellowstone becomes the first national park
It was created before Wyoming, Montana or Idaho had even become states.
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1876
Grey squirrels are released in Britain
They have since pushed out red squirrels across most of England.
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1882
Jumbo the elephant is sold to P. T. Barnum
His name gave us the word 'jumbo' for anything huge.
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1883
Krakatoa erupts
The explosion was heard nearly 4,800 km away on the island of Rodrigues.
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1883
The last quagga dies
The last quagga, a half-striped zebra, died in Amsterdam Zoo.
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1884
The oldest known photo of a tornado is taken
It was taken in Dakota Territory, near the town of Howard.
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1890
Starlings are released in Central Park
About 100 birds released in New York became a population of many millions.
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1900
The Galveston hurricane
It remains the deadliest natural disaster in US history.
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1901
The okapi becomes known to science
Scientists first thought this shy giraffe relative was a kind of zebra.
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1902
Mount Pelée destroys Saint-Pierre
One of the few survivors was a prisoner protected by his thick-walled cell.
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1905
Dippy the Diplodocus goes on show in London
Andrew Carnegie gave casts of his Diplodocus to museums around the world.
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1905
Tyrannosaurus rex is named
Henry Fairfield Osborn gave it a name meaning 'tyrant lizard king'.
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1906
The San Francisco earthquake
Most of the damage came from fires that burned for days afterwards.
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1908
The Tunguska explosion flattens a Siberian forest
It flattened about 80 million trees, but no crater was ever found.
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1909
Sweden opens Europe's first national parks
Nine parks were created in a single year.
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1912
The Komodo dragon is described by science
Western scientists learned of it only after a Dutch officer investigated reports.
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1913
Death Valley records Earth's hottest temperature
Its reading of 56.7°C is still recognised as the world record.
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1914
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, dies
Her species once numbered in the billions, with flocks darkening the sky for hours.
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1919
The Grand Canyon becomes a national park
Theodore Roosevelt had already protected it as a national monument in 1908.
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1923
The Great Kanto earthquake
It struck at lunchtime, and fires from cooking stoves spread through Tokyo.
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1935
Cane toads are released in Australia
They were meant to eat beetles but became a major pest themselves.
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1935
The Dust Bowl's 'Black Sunday'
A huge dust storm turned day into night across the Great Plains.
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1936
The last known thylacine dies
It died at Hobart Zoo just 59 days after the species was given legal protection.
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1938
A living coelacanth is found
Thought extinct for 66 million years, one turned up in a South African fishing catch.
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1960
The Valdivia earthquake
It is the strongest earthquake ever recorded.
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1961
The WWF is founded
Its panda logo was inspired by Chi Chi, a giant panda at London Zoo.
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1962
Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring
Her book helped lead to a US ban on the pesticide DDT.
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1963
The island of Surtsey rises from the sea
Scientists have studied how life colonises the new island ever since.
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1964
The Great Alaska earthquake
It is the most powerful earthquake recorded in North America.
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1970
The first Earth Day
Around 20 million Americans took part.
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1975
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is created
The reef is the largest structure built by living things.
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1980
Mount St. Helens erupts
The blast lowered the mountain's summit by about 400 metres.
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1983
Antarctica records Earth's coldest temperature
Russia's Vostok Station measured -89.2°C.
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1985
The ozone hole over Antarctica is discovered
British Antarctic Survey scientists at first doubted their own readings.
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1990
Sue, the most complete T. rex, is found
The skeleton is named after the fossil hunter who spotted it.
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1991
Mount Pinatubo erupts
It cooled global temperatures by about 0.5°C for more than a year.
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1995
Wolves are reintroduced to Yellowstone
Their return changed the behaviour of elk and even helped rivers.
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1997
Comet Hale-Bopp lights up the sky
It was visible to the naked eye for about 18 months.
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2000
The last Pyrenean ibex dies
In 2003 scientists cloned one, but the kid lived for only a few minutes.
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2004
A giant squid is photographed alive
Japanese researchers caught it on camera about 900 metres deep in the Pacific.
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2004
The Indian Ocean tsunami
Waves struck coasts in more than a dozen countries.
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2005
Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans
About 80% of the city flooded.
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2008
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opens
It is built into an Arctic mountain to safeguard the world's crop seeds.
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2010
Eyjafjallajökull's ash cloud grounds flights
It caused Europe's biggest air-travel shutdown since the Second World War.
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2011
The Tōhoku earthquake strikes Japan
It shifted Earth's axis by several centimetres.
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2012
Lonesome George, the last Pinta tortoise, dies
He was the last known giant tortoise from Pinta Island.
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2013
A meteor explodes over Chelyabinsk
Dashboard cameras across Russia captured it from many angles.
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2016
A feathered dinosaur tail is found in amber
The tail, trapped in Myanmar amber, still had its feathers.
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2022
The Hunga Tonga volcano erupts
Its pressure wave travelled around the world several times.
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