Yesterday, the students learned about the history of life on Earth from the formation of the first micro organisms in the oceans, to the emergence of the first plants, dinosaurs and mammals.
Their task for the afternoon was to use their newly acquired knowledge to reconstruct a large scale timeline of the Earth’s history using toilet paper. In this case, the students made two, which, combined, just about covered the entire perimeter of the lab building!
Sarah and Janina write out some of the labels…
… while Erica and Tiffany lay our the toilet paper.
The whole Earth’s history, since its formation, is comparable to 400 sheets of toilet paper, with each sheet representing 12.5 million years.
Meanwhile, with Tom’s assistance, Rob, Angela, Robyn, Lauren, and Kailie, start unravelling their timeline too.
And so the story goes…
Snowball Earth!
Rob adds the emergence of land plants with inner vessels at 0.5 Billion years.
Dr. Martins comes for a visit as the students reach 0.4 Billion years.
A desert locust conveniently “takes a break” at 380 Million years.
Sarah draws her interpretation of the Loch Ness monster as a representative of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution.
Lauren adds the first true grazers at 7 Million years.
And the story ends with the emergence of early hominins and the beginning of the Human story.
No, wait! We forgot Tom!
The students had a lot of fun recreating a toilet paper history of life on Earth “one square at a time”. It was a great bit of story-telling, and it really illustrated the sheer vastness of time elapsed since the very beginning, and how tiny our own existence is in relation to it all.
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NEWSFLASH! : TBI students unravel bog roll scam!
The exciting research taking place at TBI has contributed to many scientific breakthroughs over the years; but this time, the students stumbled across something rather unexpected. While they were laying out the toilet paper for the Timeline exercise, they found that the purported 200 sheet rolls had, in fact, only 150! It’s an outrage! There’s a lot you can get out of the 50 missing sheets… That’s 625 Million Earth years right there!
The guilty party, looking extremely innocent.
And so once again, the students at TBI roll out a new discovery. Whatever next? Stay tuned for more exciting news from Turkana!
