SINCE DARWIN, EVERYTHING EVOLVES

Every animal here is swimming.
Beginning at the left, the animals are arranged in order of development. They became more complicated!
How many can you identify, beginning with bacteria?
You won’t be able to identify all of them. Some on the left no longer exist. They are extinct. We only know them from their fossil remains in sedimentary rocks like sandstone, limestone, shale (mudstone), and coal.
Between the segmented worm and the big fish is a hermit crab. We find it in fossils, but many hermit crabs still live on Earth, and are almost identical with their ancestors.
Below the turtle find the ammonite. It is extinct, but its descendant, the chambered nautilus lives on in the ocean depths.
Once upon a time, there were no animals on land, only in the water. Find the big fish in the drawing with three big fins underneath. It was a Coelacanth. It could crawl out onto land a little way. It may be the ancestor to the animals that walked on land. It is found in fossils. There are a few Latimeria fish, its descendants, alive in the Indian Ocean even today.
The animals in this picture all swim. Name some animals, big and small that fly, walk, crawl, hop, or slither. They also evolved from animals in the sea.
Which animals in the picture are mammals?
Some animals can live in either water or on land. They are amphibians. Can you name some amphibians? They evolved before reptiles. Some amphibians, like salamanders, look like lizards, which are reptiles, but keep their skin wet.
Darwin published his theory in 1859. This was a long time ago. People then believed things hardly change at all. Certainly they didn’t know that the continents have moved! or that stars are born, burn up, explode and die! This takes more years than we can easily imagine.
Biologists have added to Darwin’s ideas, but his theory has stood the test of time: It remains useful to explain what we find in the fossils and on Earth today, even though we know a lot more about geology and biology.

by Trudy Myrrh Reagan, © 2009