Earths Amazing Diversity of Life

Be sure you carefully examine the videos located under “Classified Videos (by Subject), then within Earth’s Amazing Diversity of Life“.  There are a amazing collection of videos there for you to examine.

 

It is clear that the mechanisms of evolution have been hard at work to produce the great diversity of life that exists here on earth at the present time. And clearly these same mechanisms were at work over the past 3.5 billion years that life has been evolving here.

What is fascinating is to explore what these mechanisms of evolution are, and how they interact to produce the beautiful diversity of life we have here on earth. The people who produce these PBS videos are attempting to provide you with an avenue to explore these issues.

The time-scale over which evolution occurs is both long for the development of new species and short for the modification of biochemical pathways within a cell.  How many years do you think it took to produce what you see in the videos from organisms that existed in the past?