The Tree of Life

Only one bar at he floor

When you look at the bottom, 3.5 billion years ago, you see only one tube rising from the floor. What does that mean? This means that there was a single common ancestor for all life. That is to say one group of organisms, namely a kind of microorganisms. Going towards the ceiling, more and more tubes are added, as you can see at the red-lighted discs.

What happens to the biodiversity?

The largest disk represents the assumed ancestor of many new species. In that period, the Cambrian, the biodiversity expanded explosively. We speak therefore of the Cambrian explosion.  When you follow those tubes towards the present, you can see some of them do not reach the ceiling.

What does that mean to the groups in question?

What does that mean to the biodiversity? It is decreasing. So the biodiversity rises up, falls down, rises again, falls down again, etcetera. Hence we have all these different periods.  In two cases the extinction grew to enormous size. In those cases we speak of mass extinction. They are displayed as branches from the timeline in the floor. In between those mass extinctions lies the Mesozoic, the era of the dinosaurs.

• THE PERMIAN MASS EXTINCTION 248 MA
  the greatest mass extinction ever recorded in the Earth’s history. About 50% of all animal families perished, as well as about 95% of all marine species and many trees.
• The K–T mass extinction 65 MA
  this one is especially known from the extinction of the dinosaurs. In fact dinosaurs were not the only victims of this extinction – about 85% of all species inhabiting the Earth at that time went extinct, among them many marine species.[ Possible cause: volcanic activity, meteorite.]
• [So, why is biodiversity important? Life goes on anyway, for the past 3.5 billions of years. Maybe it only is important if you want to keep what you have, when you want to preserve the status quo (mankind)]

Can we also find man in the tree? Yes you can. What do we find on top of the tube in the floor of the theatre of nature? It is a lamp with the sign “MENSEN”. All those lamps on the second floor are on top of a branch of the tree of life. This makes clear that the groups of organisms over there are sorted by origin.