A Timeline RESOURCE 2
KIWI FOREVER A Timeline RESOURCE 2
Through this experience students will explore the time people have lived on earth compared with evolutionary time, and consider the big idea of respecting all life because our lives are intertwined. Use the information on the table to create an outdoor timeline to explore human time on earth relative to the total time that scientists estimate life has been evolving on earth. Fourty-six metres is roughly half the length of a football fi eld.
Event Time Relative measure on 46 metre line outside
Beginning of earth 4,600,000,000 The beginning of the Earth is at one end of (4.6 billion years ago) the line. This is year zero. First life 3,000,000,000 Measure 1.6 metres from year zero. (3 billion years ago) Dinosaurs take fi rst steps 248,000,000 43.52 metres from year zero. During this time the relatives of the tuatara lived (248 million years ago) Birds started fl ying 150,000,000 44.50 metres from year zero. (150 million years ago) Dinosaurs went extinct 63,000,000 45.37 metres from year zero. (63 million years ago) Kiwi ancestors evolved in Gondwana 60,000,000* 45.40 metres from year zero. (60 million years ago) First modern humans born 190,000 45.998 metres from year zero or 0.19 (190 thousand years ago) millimetres from today (or about half the thickness of a human hair). First human occupation of New Zealand 700 – 800 years ago A very small distance from the end of the line! Extinctions since human occupation include:** From 800 years ago until • three of seven frogs; 100 years ago • at least 12 invertebrates such as snails and insects; • one fi sh, one bat and perhaps three reptiles; • possibly 11 plants; and • 51 birds*** You were born ???? A dot smaller than a pin head
* Source BNZ Save the Kiwi website www.savethekiwi.org.nz birds ashore from whence we are distant not a quarter of a ** Source New Zealand’s Biodiversity strategy 2000 www.biodiversity.govt.nz mile. Their voices were certainly the most melodious wild *** Source www.teara.govt.nz/en/extinctions/4 All other information from http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/ music I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with prehistoric-world/prehistoric-time-line.html the most tuneable silver sound imaginable… They begin to sing at about 1 to 2 in the morn and continue until sunrise.” Other websites that may support student investigations: – www.teara.govt.nz/en/evolution-of-plants-and-animals/1/2 “The fi ght against extinction continues,” says Blackburn. – www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/Geologictime.html “There is no second chance for anything that’s lost. Celebrate – www.dinosaurisle.com/timeline.aspx all that is distinctive. People come here to experience the so-called ‘100% pure’ New Zealand environment, and that Read the excerpt from the NZ Listener: NZ Listener Article includes special birds like the bellbird. Gone Forever by Susan Buckland (March 19-25 2005 Vol 198 No 3384), and discuss some of the implications of this. Refl ection Think of New Zealand as the extinction capital of the world, says British scientist Dr Tim Blackburn. To understand Do you think the people who came to New Zealand the damage humanity can wreck on irreplaceable fl ora deliberately wanted to get rid of the animals that lived here? and fauna, New Zealand is the place to be.... “The effects What happened when they brought introduced animals of habitat destruction and exotic predators – the worst to New Zealand? among them rats, cats, possums and stoats – have undone 80 million years of unique evolutionary history in just one Discuss what it means to learn from the past to inform hundred-thousandth of that time,” says Blackburn. the future. Only 220 years ago, Captain Cook’s botanist, Joseph Banks, Imagine you are one of the fi rst people to come to New wrote of these shores: “I was awak’d by the singing of the Zealand: what advice would you give to people about the biodiversity that you fi nd here?