Location: 2nd Floor

Journey through nearly four billion years of life on Earth to discover how some of the earliest organisms changed our world and how evolution connects all living things. Study real specimens and dig deep through the fossil record, while exploring the five major extinctions and how life persisted through them all.

 

Things to Look For

 

Meet Majungasaurus, a late Cretaceous dinosaur from the Mahajanga province of Madagascar and the largest predator of its environment.

 

Diorama: Though a handful of nautiloids are still living today, in the early Paleozoic era they were the main predatory animals.

 

Explore 4.5 billion years of history by thinking of geologic time as a single year and seeing when some of Earth’s most important events took place.

 

Discover Dolichorhynchops, a short-necked plesiosaur of the Cretaceous period that lived in the shallow seas covering the land that is now Wyoming and Kansas.

 

Step into the Cenozoic Era and learn why some scientists think we are currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction.

 

Come face-to-face with Australopithecus sediba, a life-size sculptural reconstruction of an extinct human relative that lived in southern Africa about 2 million years ago. Read more about the creation of this A. sediba model here.

 

 

© 2022 Regents of the University of Michigan