First, hello to anybody who remembers me from the .com and .org sites! It's been a while...

Anyway, I see geologic time scale charts that look like this:

and I want to create another one, but much longer so I can show more details. I've already gotten a binder and put pages in it to create a "book" timeline. Here it's opened to the page from 75 to 100 million years ago, with ages labelled.

As in the first timeline, I want to put pictures of life that existed at the time. Does anybody know good resources that will give tell me what types of life existed at a given point in time, so I can find appropriate photos to put in there? I know I can look at the Wikipedia pages for the different periods and go from there, but other places may be more helpful.

I don't think you'll find photos! :-)

Just now, pzkpfw said:

I don't think you'll find photos! :-)

Actually, I'm considering adding real photos of fossils as well as artistic reconstructions of what the living animal may have looked like.

25 minutes ago, anticorncob28 said:

First, hello to anybody who remembers me from the .com and .org sites! It's been a while...

Anyway, I see geologic time scale charts that look like this:

and I want to create another one, but much longer so I can show more details. I've already gotten a binder and put pages in it to create a "book" timeline. Here it's opened to the page from 75 to 100 million years ago, with ages labelled.

As in the first timeline, I want to put pictures of life that existed at the time. Does anybody know good resources that will give tell me what types of life existed at a given point in time, so I can find appropriate photos to put in there? I know I can look at the Wikipedia pages for the different periods and go from there, but other places may be more helpful.

Since at any given time , except the very start, there were millions of life forms, I imagine you want some selected forms characteristic of the period, don’t you?

How about this from the British Natural History museum?: https://www.nhmimages.com

I found a hallucigenia fossil and some ichthyosaur pics just now when trying it out.

Hello and welcome, nice to see a real science project.

My interest has always been more physical geology than palaentology so the few books I have on that side of things tend to have hand drawn sketches.

Nevertheless here are some thoughts.

First Adrian Lister has an excellent book published by the Natural History Museum who hold Darwin's fossil collection.

It is a cheap full colour book well worth looking at to see how they did it.

The Nat Hist Mus itself is also well worht the visit.

A few years ago I obtained this book from Cambridge University Press which gives calibration data for timelines.

It's quite a thick A4 book that goes into minute detail.

The science book of the year 2024 is interesting and gives the most up to date taxonomy, though the few diagrams are poor.

A better book in some ways by the professor of Palaentology at Bristol is

When Life Nearly Died

This has quite a few useful dated timelines of the sort you describe.

32 minutes ago, pzkpfw said:

I don't think you'll find photos! :-)

LoL.

You could cut the 'millions' down to a mere 10,000 described species by just restricting your project initially to Ammonoidea. They have a continuous distribution spanning around 250 million years and because of their status as important index fossils for dating of sedimentary strata, they are well documented and dated.

Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish and descendants) is another interesting clade which spans even longer ~416 million years to present. You might want to limit that one to marine forms only as the numbers start growing exponentially from the Carboniferous on when some of them ventured onto land.

My apologies I omitted the name of the last author it is

Prof Michael Benton.

One other thought.

It is useful and common these days in paleobiology to link the timeline to other physical geological events (the sort I am more interested in), especially in the light of plate techtonics and 'continental drift'.

Going by actual years ago, rather than geological ages, is better because they occurred at somewhat differnt times in different parts of the globe, and also they have somewhat differnt names in different parts of the globe, names that are still being chnged.

So here are few more sources.

The Winters of the World

Brian John (editor)

David and Charles

A timeline of ice ages

Eruptions that shook the World

Oppenheimer

Cambridge University Press

Obviously a history of vulcanism.

The Emerald Planet

Beerling

Oxford University Press

A history of the atmousphere

Origins

Ron Redfern

Cassell and Co

The Evolution of the Continents, Oceans and Life.

I would check out "The Ancestor's tale" by Richard Dawkins. 4 billion years of evolutionary history.