A video documenting 527 million years of evolution
Seems like to today is turning into the film Fridays that I always looked forward to early on in my education. You probably deserve a break from this week’s blogging. This video that I’ll be sharing with you has many flaws, but it is a creative way to visualize the evolutionary processes. I don’t particularly appreciate how little to no effort was made to show the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event nor the dearth of mammalian evolution, instead they literally fast forwarded millions of years of evolution to show an ape walking bipedally in the trees… which is a somewhat dangerous interpretation.
Anyways, its flawed but it is entertaining, especially since I brought up limb evolution during the Devonian. The video also gets plus points because it plays a favorite Nine Inch Nails song of mine,
Nice video, although it also seems to skip from the Triassic directly to primate-hominid evolution, which occurred much much later.
Shakeel
January 25, 2008 at 4:55 pm
You’ll enjoy this video, then. Evolution played backwards, starting with the most important part (Guinness).
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Lc6U7_-BeGc
Roads
January 26, 2008 at 3:32 am
Nice video
Peter
January 26, 2008 at 6:08 am
For anyone interested, this is a mash-up of clips from three BBC documentaries: Walking With Monsters, Walking With Dinosaurs, and Walking With Beasts. They’re worth a watch… but they don’t as good a soundtrack as this video.
Joseph
January 26, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Ahh that’s good to know, Joseph. I didn’t know exactly where these clips came from! Thanks for telling us. I had a feeling the dino one came from Walking with Dinosaurs, though.
Kambiz
January 26, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Haha Roads, I’ve seen that one. On the old version of Anthropology.net, I had put up that commercial! I forgot to transfer it over, during last years move. Thanks for finding it.
Kambiz
January 26, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I find it highly intruiging that with each miniscule change, like a fish getting 1mm larger, there’s a huge amount of variations to that (1mm smaller or some other part changing) that either die out or evolve into a different species. These changes are also not just on the outside, but on the inside. I mean, it would definitely be cool with a video where the redundancy of the spleen was given it’s context ;D
Robin Öberg
January 28, 2008 at 2:44 am
And yes, that jump to the humans at the end was a little bit weird. What’s next, showing how culture has evolved evolutionary, with monkeys using their thumbs and such. :)
Robin Öberg
January 28, 2008 at 2:46 am