The more things change, the more they stay the same

Credit: Bengt Nyman

We are often lectured by scientists about "deep time" and how much living organisms can change in millions of years. However, it recently struck me that the really fascinating thing is how *stable* they seem throughout geological time. 

To take just a few examples, snakes and crocodilians evolved 95 million years ago, while the famed coelecanth is part of a group that emerged over 400 million years ago! Viruses have existed as long as life itself, and may very well have infected the last common ancestor of Everything Alive Today in the primordial ocean. They may even have *predated* life. Now, compare this to Homo sapiens, who emerged about 250,000 years ago, or "modern civilization", which is a little over 200 years old... 

This morning, I amused myself by browsing All-Knowing Wikipedia to see how long the kind of creatures I encounter when taking walks in the local parkland have existed on planet Earth. Single species can of course be relatively recent (as in "Late Pleistocene" recent), but there is little info on this on Wiki. So I looked up genera and in some cases subfamilies or families. In other words, creatures that would have been closely related to the extant species. 

This is what I found (YBP = Years Before Present)... 

Larus (gulls): 20 million YBP

Corvidae (corvids): 17 million YBP (the Old World jay lineage)

Ardea (herons): 11 - 15 million YBP

Anser (grey and white geese): 5 - 15 million YBP

Cygnus (swans): 5 - 11 million YBP

Anas/Anatinae (dabbling ducks) : 5 - 11 million YBP

Canis (wolves, dogs): 9 - 10 million YBP

Felis (cats): 6 - 7 million YBP 

Corvus (crows): 5 million YBP 

Pica (magpies): 3 million YBP

Homo (humans): 2 million YBP

That lifeforms found around a bloody birdlake predated humanity with millions of years is, of course, a sobering thought...

Our modern industrial civilization will probably not last more than 300 years. If I counted correctly, that´s 0.0015% of the time gulls of the genus Larus have existed on Earth.

Make of that what you wish.