Scroll down a wall of rock and you travel back 4,567 million years, to the first solid grains of the Solar System.
The scale never changes: one screen is 100 million years. Where a lot happens the clock slows to let you read, and says so. Where nothing much happens, you will feel how long that took.
This bar: 13 million years
Every picture is a photograph of the evidence: a real rock, fossil or mineral of that age. Nothing is drawn.The column on the left is in the colours geologists use for each span of time on maps worldwide.A running log shows oxygen, temperature and the number of kinds of sea animal, wherever there is a record.Black cards are the five mass extinctions.