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Birth of Planet Earth
4.5 billion years ago, Earth grew from a cloud of dust and rocks surrounding the Sun. Earth formed when some of these rocks collided. Eventually they were massive enough to attract other rocks with the force of gravity, and vacuumed up all the nearby rubbish, becoming the planet Earth. -
First Organisms
Nobody really knows when life began on Earth. The oldest confirmed fossils, of single-celled microorganisms, are roughly 3.5 billion years old. Life may have begun a bit earlier than that, but probably not while huge rocks were still raining down on Earth. Life may have begun in open water, or on land. We don't know, and we don't know what the first organisms were like. -
Continents Form
Earth's surface is divided into a few dozen plates of rock, one of which sometimes ploughs under another to be destroyed in the planet's molten heart. Plate tectonics, is thought to have begun around 3 billion years ago. -
First Major Extinction
The Ordovician period was a time when life began to go extinct roughly 460-430 million years ago. But towards its end, the world cooled dramatically and ice sheets spread from the poles. -
Permain Extintion
Life on Earth faced perhaps its greatest challenge especially with reptiles. The Permian extinction was possibly one of the worst mass extinction in the planet's history. Nobody really knows what caused it, but massive this volcanic eruption may have been to blame for the first creation of the dinosaurs evolution.
