Image appears here with the kind permission of its creator, John Kyrk.
A friend sent me a link to an interesting website. John Kyrk, an artist and biologist, has recreated a huge variety of biology topics using interactive flash animations, ranging from animo acids and proteins to water chemistry, from meiosis to electron transport. All of the material on this site looks like great teaching aides and they are also really fun to play with.
One of these animations is a timeline through the evolution of life beginning with the Big Bang. I am still poking around John’s site, but I think the evolution animation is especially interesting because it includes so much information; movements of continental landmasses, evolution of all major life forms, and atmospheric oxygen levels combined with evolutionary and geologic timelines, all of which provide a reasonably complete understanding of just how much time has actually passed and how things all fit together.