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prehistoric life the incredible collection of living things that appeared on earth long before we did many came and went others came and stayed we may call it prehistory but to those that lived it it wasn't pretty anything it was their story and in many ways it's ours too prehistory is the story that began long before any human hand made marks on a page the earliest storytellers imagined a time when there was no life at all Chinese myth tells of chaos shaped like an egg and split apart by two energies that battled inside it Australian Aborigines and village a bear play in the time when their eternal ancestors slept many scientists now believe that from an explosion called the Big Bang came a universe of swirling debris including the molten glob that became our globe across millions of years a kind of soup began to float on the surface of murky seas but when how can we tell the time passing in a world unseen by any living thing an early estimate was by a 17th century scholar Archbishop Asha by adding up the ages of people named in the Bible he calculated that the earth was created in 4004 BC meanwhile at Cambridge University John Lightfoot aimed for more pinpoint accuracy he agreed the year and added a date Sunday October the 26th and a time exactly 9 a.m. in the 18th century the first geologists cast doubt on such a tender age Clues embedded in Earth's rocky layers pointed to a much older planet before another century passed Charles Darwin the great naturalist was to argue that Earth's age should be calculated not in thousands but in means we now count the age of our venerable planet in billions of years four and a half billion how can we with our fleeting lifespan grapple with such numbers if you take something old like the entire recorded history of the known world and multiply by a thousand years now multiply again by a thousand then add half a billion more years that's something closer to Earth's true age and at first things didn't exactly happen fast the lifeless soup drifted for about a billion years 365 billion sunrises before there was a single cell around to take advantage of sunlight then complex chemicals took form perhaps mixing with chemicals arriving from outer space triggered maybe by lightning or by ultraviolet light the organic compounds began to link together and form proteins the proteins grew and split life was launched the record of prehistoric life is written in rock fossils the word means literally dug out dig this fossil and you're looking at traces of the oldest living things ever found strands of simple algae at least three and a half billion years old the my new threads left their marks as they died embedded in layers of mud that turned to rock it's inside stony cabbages like these found in a few rare places on the Australian coast that the evidence is stored there maybe nowhere else on earth that looks more like the scene of life's first stirrings when life stop stirring it may recall the moment in a fossil if mud or sand settles quickly and turns to rock the recently deceased is stored in the vaults of time fossils are also found deep inside peat tar ice or golden amber the resin of ancient trees some of the tiniest living things were caught in the glowing news as earth rocky layers are laid down pushed up and crumble away fossils emerge there are the only direct evidence of prehistoric life of all the life forms ever to exist 99% are now extinct only a very few of them left a trace from the first primitive living things to more complex organisms another billion years passed now there was enough oxygen around for life to get organized into multi-celled beings DNA provided endless possibilities and life took an ever-increasing variety of forms but only after another billion years or more does the evidence show a gathering storm of life from a more recent layer come more than a dozen different kinds of jellyfish looking like flowers flattened in their 2-dimensional graves there were worms and sea pens and other strange animals writing their history on the ocean floor this was the age of the soft bodies more than 5/6 of the way through Earth's history the rocky record begins to fill with the marks of ever stranger creatures from its fossil it seemed this odd animal Hallucigenia had seven pairs of still glide legs and seven tentacles with which to feed or was that getting it upside down a few years later scientists realized the seven stilts were actually a spiky back and the seven tentacles were walking legs fossils don't come marked this way I'm just a hundred million years later came and confirm assistance with a tail it may have used like a limb to travel backwards across the seabed it sifted the water for food through a primitive mouth then expelled it through slits at the other end these complex new creatures shared the Seas with the first fish with no jaws as yet they swallow their prey whole the first bite as we know it was still a long way off but not the first sight some of the very first glimpses of the world was seen by these eyes those of the trilobite some were so well preserved but scientists have used the fossilized lenses to take photographs the trilobite had an entirely new chassis segmented and flexible it could curl up for defense there were trial about smaller than walnut and others bigger the coconut eyes were some of the sophisticated new features that began to evolve before another hundred million years have passed some of the big artillery arrived combining keen eyesight with the first biting mouths imagine a great white shark wearing full body armor and you got the leading predator of its day Dunkleosteus long before the more famous jaws it 8 primitive sharks for breakfast whether a fossil comes from a watery grave or a dusty D it comes up needing a date Marie Curie is famous for discovering x-rays but her work with radioactivity also made it possible to assign dates to fossils chemical elements within rocks decay and that decay can be measured for instance the less uranium-238 of rock contains the older it is whatever its age assembling a fossil is like building a model but with no instructions definitely no picture on the box and most likely with pieces missing just before the age of fishes some early pioneers had made landfall but these colonizers weren't animals there were plants small and without leaves or flowers they did have the first roots at first plants were alone on land and threatened by animals it couldn't last soon came the pitter-patter of tiny feet arthropods the forerunners of millions of small creeping insects and crustaceans meanwhile the continents we know today barely existed several were massed together in one expanse later named Gondwanaland Europe Greenland and North America remained separate all were drifting the crusts of bread on a thick rocky steel the dry land was claimed next by swimmers from a watery world how this fossil holds the answer some fish developed lands enabling them to emerge from shallow water and still breathe and bony fins began to support their weight on that the fossilized coelacanth reveals the kinds of bones which took the first-ever steps such bones were to become feet the first amphibians had landed the ocean-dwelling coelacanth was presumed extinct until 1938 when one made a startling appearance off the coast of South Africa 14 years went by before another was found but more coelacanths have since been discovered alive near Madagascar their living fossils little change from the time before the dinosaurs if one such ghost still swims the sea today why not other bizarre relics since pre-biblical times sailors have told of huge monsters and sea serpents with water covering two-thirds of the earth it's easy to imagine other strange survivors swimming the depths like the coelacanth the persistent claims that Loch Ness in Scotland holds a creature unlike any other a fossil that certainly dead and buried his coal one of the fossil fuels it now supports life with its heat and light coal formed when rotting plants turned to peat and were further compressed over millions of years as seams of coal that would one day fire the Industrial Revolution first formed along came a sturdy new creature making its debut during the age of coal the cockroach it can withstand extreme heat and cold drought and famine no wonder it's hardly changed across time segmented bodies were a hit and this was just one of the insects to scurry through the leaf litter today's cockroaches scavenge for anything from toenails to toothpaste could their well-known partiality for small dark crevices have led to the use of cockroaches as a remedy for earache ground cockroach entrails mixed with oil were used as recently as the 16th century to treat a painful ear the ancient cockroach had some truly fantastic neighbors giganto Scorpio ten times the size of a modern-day scorpion with a stinger the size of a kitchen knife even larger arthropleura took locomotion to new lengths like a centipede crossed with a stretch limo would dragonflies seven times the size of the modern emperor dragonfly and the first reptiles evolved from amphibians they were adapted to life on land laying eggs with a tough skim that didn't dry out in air a major new development fossils lay buried for millions of years before they were first glimpsed by some late comers in the evolutionary story fossil collectors among the first to profit from the finds was a nineteenth-century British girl Mary Annie when just 11 years old Mary found an ichthyosaur in sands near her home she sold it for 23 pounds the price of a small house at the time just 280 million years ago the continents were still mostly bunched together in one gigantic landmass Pangaea all earth plants and animals could spread from one continent to another wandering or drifting with ease since then the continents have moved away from each other so almost identical fossils have been found as far apart a South America and Australia a vast number of animals have walked the earth estimates run as high as 3 billion different species none has so mesmerized the human mind as the largest of them all Tyrannosaurus Rex mascot of the age of the dinosaurs you in t-rex was topped by flying reptiles like the giant pterosaur in the Nevada desert a reconstructed pterosaur took flight with a computer for a brain even at half scale its wingspan matched that of a modern glider the last time such a shadow was caused on these rocks dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time the cockroach was well on his way to becoming one of the most tenacious creatures on earth now it had a new scheme instead of laying single eggs it produced egg cases that held 40 or 50 eggs each cockroaches that foraged successfully by night were favored to survive sensitive antennae could detect the slightest disturbance and trigger tiny legs to take off sixty-five million years ago cockroaches must have run for cover when something wiped out the dinosaurs possibly a massive meteorite climatic change or even cancer caused by radiation from a collapsing star the age of the dinosaurs had come to an end yet this was not the largest extinction ever that happened before the dinosaurs existed when 95% of all living species suddenly vanished from the fossil record it's possible that pangaea's own geography contributed to the deaths one single landmass half frozen half desert was ill-equipped to absorb the impact of a massive change surviving both these extinctions was yes the cockroach which no doubt feasted on the remains of the dead but none benefited from the dinosaurs demise quite as much as some new creatures waiting in the wings mammals unlike the reptiles mammals were warm-blooded they could hunt at night and they developed special tools to carry with them on the hand daggers and blades slicers and chocolates for some permanent meshing teeth and unlike reptiles whose eggs are vulnerable to attack the mammals had a new reproductive system they're young developed internally and newborns were fed on milk the complex design worked for mammals on the wing beneath the waves and underground and arms and legs could carry mammals across the continents all evolved from animals that lived when the dinosaurs walked the earth there were other survivors from before the dinosaurs the Magnolia one of the most ancient flowers on earth the crocodile that has changed a bit Sam crocodiles once grew to the length of two tanks put end to end maybe it's not so surprising that early images of dragons are virtually identical to crocodiles with wings birds too survived from out of the reptiles they had flown with the feathers evolved from scales by the middle of the 19th century scientists were racing to come up with an explanation for it all why and how had such a variety of living things come into being Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was based on his observations of the natural world by 1859 he concluded that the animals best suited to survive are the ones most likely to pass their characteristics on to the next generation tortoises were one tip-off in the Galapagos Islands those that needed to reach high into the brush for food could their necks different from those of tortoises on the other islands seemed to have evolved for the purpose Darwin's new theory could explain even this a three-toed foot on a horse lag animal as the strongest tow continued to evolve it became the single hoop seen today with fantastic running ability over hard ground as a period much closer to our own time thundered along familiar forms took shape but with unfamiliar twists the ground sloth didn't live in trees like its descendants since few trees could support its great weight giant elk bore equally giant and the elephant bird laid eggs that were almost 200 times larger than hen's egg today some animals grew to immense sizes just because they could there was an abundance of food and little competition other animals however started small the earliest horses were only the size of a dog millions of years after the dinosaurs weird and wonderful creatures still walk the earth or found other means of travel with features that were scrambled in surprising combinations the South American mixed up mammal had an elephant's trunk a camel's body and the feet of a rhinoceros 550 million years ago the continents were nearly as they are today but still traveling India ground into Asia creating the Himalayas which are still rising today Antarctica headed south into its deep freeze the stage was set for the emergence of a mammal that would find entirely new ways to occupy every corner of the planet it would evolve from a creature with links to both past and present whose remains were first discovered in 1974 the spectacular find was named Lucy after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds australopithecus afarensis lucy was related to both apes and humans though an adult she stood just slightly taller than an average six year old child but she stood she was among the first primates to walk upright others of Lucy's kind left these footprints probably to adults with a child they walked the earth at least 3.7 million years ago although Darwin's theory had unleashed a storm of debate that continues today there's little disagreement among scientists about three million years after Lucy one animal evolved into a familiar-looking hunter with a remarkable brain Homo sapiens from the Latin meaning wise person modern humanities debut came just a heartbeat ago by earth time it wasn't a smooth ride there were at least seven variations on the human theme including the Neanderthals whose remains were first found at the Neander Valley in Germany Neandertal stood nearly two meters tall with immense both they've been portrayed as dull unfeeling but scientists had misinterpreted their find a scowl ravaged by disease evidence indicates the Neanderthals buried flowers with their dead another human species was to out hunt the Neanderthals and drive them to extinction the new omnivore had a feature that would serve it well the ability to learn and invent in remarkable new ways Homo sapiens modern man has come a long way yet only in the latest blink on Earth's timescale so far we've merely scratched the surface of our planets past a past that makes our own history seemed tiny by comparison and still new discoveries come to light in 1995 the Symbian Pandora the miniscule creature was found right under our noses or rather under a lobster's nose where it lives it's the first known member of an entirely new group of living things we can only wonder what other creatures may have come and gone without leaving a trace whatever our future holds it's likely that life in some form will carry on tenacious and resilience of the cockroach and could another life story be in the making in a universe of solar systems it seems more than possible in 1996 two distant planets were found to have conditions that might support life temperatures not unlike the Earth's so long ago and the potential for rain and oceans they're prehistoric life could just possibly be getting started now you