The way points of this running / walking route:
Dawn of multicellular animal life approximately one billion years ago.
The choanoflagellates are a group of free-living unicellular and colonial flagellate eukaryotes considered to be the closest living relatives of the animals. As the name suggests, choanoflagellates (collared flagellates) have a distinctive cell morphology characterized by an ovoid or spherical cell body 3–10 µm in diameter with a single apical flagellum surrounded by a collar of 30–40 microvilli.
800 mya we had a common ancestor with sponges and other members of the phylum Porifera
Trichoplax adhaerens is a tiny seawater organism that lacks any organs and has only five types of cells, giving it the appearance of an amoeba.
Sponges (Porifera)
Placozoans
Flatworms join 630mya
Protosomes & Deuterosomes diverge 590mya
Concestor of Lamprey and Hagfish exist around 530mya
Here we find a common concestor that is ancestor to all gnathostomes, animals with lower jaws, a structure which evolved from the gill arches.
Fish, eels, mudskippers and sea-horses appear around 440mya having survived the first major extinction of the Ordovician-Silurian transition around 450mya
Lobe finned air breathing bony aquatic fish make an appearance around 417mya
Starts 375mya and lasts 15-20my to 360mya where upto 70% of all species died out.
Frogs, salamanders and caecilians appear around 340mya. These will give rise to all terrestrial vertebrates.
The concestor of all reptiles (including turtles, lizards, snakes and dinosaurs) and the precursor of birds evolve.
Permian-Triassic starts 251mya and ends 205mya allowing the dinosaurs to thrive exploiting almost all ecological niches.
Dinosaurs evolve and compete with other large amphibians for terrestrial spaces.
Triassic-Jurassic extinction 205mya
Echidna and platypus are the surviving descendents of concestors that evolved 180mya that were first to develop a NeoCortex in their brains.
Kangaroos, wallabies, sugar gliders, opposums and marsupial moles evolve 140mya
The concestor of this extremely diverse group of mammals evolves 85mya but the various genera are still confined to disparate ecological niches due to the overpowering dominance of the dinosaurs.
Extinction of the dinosaurs 65mya
Current time, the earth has been completely over-run by humans, who, by their activities , are changing the climate which threatens all life on earth which cannot evolve to accommodate these changes.
