Everyone likes a good story, and no story is grander than the saga of Earth and the life on it. It’s a very long tale—spanning over 4.5 billion years—but it features plenty of plot twists, scene changes, and a cast of amazing characters. Including you: your body contains traces of life’s long journey across deep time, the billions of years from Earth’s formation to today.
Earth always has been a dynamic place; as it changes, so does life. Earth’s distant past shapes the present in which you play a part, and it influences how the future will unfold. The planet today is a product of enduring geological forces, biological evolution, and climatic change over time. All these factors—plus our actions—will affect the world of tomorrow.
The Deep Time Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is a place where you can explore the grandeur of Earth’s history, discover the fossils that reveal the mysteries of life’s past 3.7 billion years, ponder how the present world came to be, and prepare for a sustainable future. You’ll glimpse ancient life’s beauty and diversity in the sea and on land. Following in the footsteps of paleobiologists—scientists who study fossil plants and animals—you’ll investigate what can be learned from the rock record of our planet’s rich past.
This book takes you from the earliest Earth, just after the planet formed, through successive eras in time and turning points of evolution, up to the age of humans. From the viewpoint of deep time, climates and ecosystems constantly shift, and species come and go. Some groups, like the dinosaurs featured here, endure for vast stretches of time. Our species is still young, yet it is having a huge global impact that will influence the outcome of Earth’s next chapter.