Please complete this assignment as required.Please complete this
assignment by yourself and abide by the University of Miami Honor Code.
This assignment is due by midnight on 11/15/2023. Late assignments will receive 10 points off.
When
dealing with deep time, we are working with profoundly large numbers
that our minds are not well equipped to understand on a more intuitive
level. Thus, in order to make sense of it all, scientists resort to
breaking the time up into sections and subsection within which they
organize and categorize all of the geological and evolutionary data and
events as they are discovered. Still, it can be difficult to appreciate
the temporal “distances” between one event and the next, and an often
helpful tool for doing so is to draw out major events in the evolution
of our planet and biosphere on a timeline.
For this assignment you
will complete a timeline of the Earth, which is to a single, linear
scale, covers the time from the formation of the Earth until today. This
should be done on PowerPoint and the assignment submitted to me as a
digital copy in Blackboard. The line must be long enough to convey the
timeline accurately and to scale (I will explain in class). The
length is meant to start you on the process of thinking about deep time
the way geologists do. You must include the events and first (known)
occurrences of organisms listed below. Additionally, you must add five
other events or first organisms which you think are significant in the
evolution of life on Earth. Do not include events prior to the formation
of the Earth or events in human history. On a separate PowerPoint
slide, for each of your personal submissions, please include a brief
statement (fewer than 50 words each) explaining why you think that it is
a significant event in the history of life on this planet.
For
each event or organism, you must include a start date according to
current science. Dates should be given to as to as close to the event as
is known in the literature (please do not give me time ranges). You may
use the abbreviations Ga (billion years ago), Ma (million years ago)
and ka (thousand years ago).
Each entry must include a date, a label (including the genus (Italicized) for organisms marked with an asterisk), and a source.
–Here are two examples of appropriate labels to get you started:
4.5 Ga. Formation of the Moon. (M. Barboni et al. Early formation of the Moon 4.51 billion years ago. Sci. Adv. 3, e1602365 (2017))
or
Favorite Cretaceous dinosaur. 70 Ma. Therizinosaurus. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therizinosaurus)
–Here are two examples of potential timeline layouts on PowerPoint: Single Slide Layout:
Multiple Slide Layout:
You will be graded on the presentation of your scale, the accuracy of your labels, the quality and diversity of your sources (please do not cite my lectures), and the quality of your five extra events. Wikipedia is fine for some well-
established numbers, “history of the Earth” websites and articles are OK, but science blogs and press releases are better).
Required Events and First Occurrence of Organisms (not in chronological order)
Birds*
Dinosaurs*
Eukaryotes
Fish*
Formation of the Earth Formation of the Moon Flowers*
Humans*
Insects*
KT extinction
Land animals*
Life on Earth
Mammals*
Metazoans
Oxygenation of the atmosphere
PT extinction
Trees*
Whales*
Your favorite Cretaceous dinosaur* Your favorite Jurassic dinosaur*
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