300 million years . . . in a page......

300 million years ago this spot was a humid swamp that straddled the equator and was filled with extraordinary animals such as football-sized spiders and the very first reptile. Looking much like today’s Iguana this was the ancestor of reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and us.

250 million years ago the continents were moving together making the climate drier. A desert that stretched from Siberia to Antarctica replaced the biggest rainforest the world has ever known. Fewer trees meant more CO2 was in the atmosphere and so it became even warmer. Methane, one of the worst of the greenhouse gasses, was released when the poles thawed. Volcanoes in Siberia spewed out more pollutants. The result: runaway rising temperatures. As temperatures equalised around the world, sea currents stagnated, oxygen levels dropped and the poisoned atmosphere smelt of rotten eggs. 95% of species became extinct.

200 million years ago and the world was only just getting back to normal but most of our relatives had died, leaving the way clear for dinosaurs to evolve. Their success kept our ancestors skulking under stones for the next 165 million years. Meanwhile the land was breaking apart into the continents we recognise today and shallow seas returned to cover Lincolnshire.

175 million years ago Lincolnshire basked in Bahama-like conditions and tortoises, turtles, crocodiles and dinosaurs flourished. The seas became even deeper.

100 million years ago England was entirely under water. When the tiny organisms that inhabited the seas died and fell to the bottom they formed hundreds of metres of ooze that we now call chalk. Elsewhere, dinosaurs had evolved feathers and eventually dominated the sky as well as the land. Their position at the top of the food system seemed impregnable . . . the tiny brain of a Tyrannosaurus rex was fine for day-to-day living but it was no use at all for what was going to happen next . . .

65 million years ago drifting continents were once again changing the climate and volcanoes were polluting the air but this time the final straw came from outer space: an Everest sized asteroid hit the earth and half the world’s species became extinct. Admittedly with the dinosaurs out of the way the few mammals that survived could come out of hiding, eventually evolving into all the variety we see today. The price paid at the time though was very high.

Now. Our civilisations’ emissions are mimicking the devastation wrought by volcanoes. Ice at the poles is melting. Important ocean currents are slowing. Global warming is underway.

The Future? Our scientific name means ‘wise man’. We are (probably) the most intelligent creatures to have lived on the earth. Let us hope that we can indeed use our intelligence wisely. There is still time.
Read, “Heat” by George Monbiot to find out how.