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Time Fossils and the Scientific Process Life through Time Evolutionary Milestones Extinctions Fossil Activities Fossils Glossary Further Research Link to Dinosaur Walk Link to Prehistoric Life |
 TimeThis segment documents how notions on the age of the Earth have changed, from the view held by Europeans in the seventeenth century that the Earth was created only a few thousand years ago, to the realisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it is thousands of millions of years old. Measuring the age of the Earth. This segment deals with the concepts of absolute and relative ages of rocks, the development of the relative geological time scale in the nineteenth century, and some of the methods that have been developed during the twentieth century to determine absolute ages. This segment deals with the vast expanse of time since the formation of the Earth 4,600 million years ago, and the difficulty in relating such a time scale to the one we are familiar with, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. |