Poster Life on Earth

The third planet of the of the Solar System was formed 4600 million years ago, and since 3800 million years the earth hosts living organisms. This poster focuses on the past 540 million years and projects a description of the diversity of evolution. Of course, some viruses, bacteria and archaea might argue that doing so we ignored the diversity of non-eucaryotic organisms.

We apologize for that. But "Life on Earth" does not give the impression that the complex creatures, e.g., dinosaurs & mammals, are replacing the simpler ones with time. The landscape scenarios for the Quaternary system do not exceed 2 mm height, depicting some fishes, flora and insects. Humans which evolved only in the past few thousand years are not figured. Their time span of existence is marginal in comparison to those of organism groups like insects or reptiles (non-avian sauropids) which were successful in the history of our planet.

The Editors also tried to consider that a non-specialist's knowledge about dinosaurs and other popular Mesozoic animals seems to be heavily biased to present-day Europe and North America. In this poster the Triassic terrestrial organisms are taken from what is today Africa and South America, and the Cretaceous landscape is from present-day Asia.