I designed this tapestry for my dad, who is a geologist. It is a (mostly) accurate timeline of the history of the earth.

The scale for most of the tapestry is each row represents two million yeas. However, the scale for the Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic periods is one row for each 40 million years. Otherwise the tapestry would have gone halfway down the street and been mostly fire and brimstone and blue-green algae.

I used a 2mm hook and 4 ply wool. The finished tapestry is 106 cm long and 15 cm wide.

 

Hadean

600 million years

15 rows

Represented in the tapestry by the newly formed Earth and moon.

Archean

1,500 million years

38 rows

Represented in the tapestry by blue-green algae.

Proterozoic

2,000 million years

50 rows

Represented in the tapestry by three species of Ediacara fauna – charnia, kimberella and dickinsonia.

Cambrian

56 million years

28 rows

Represented in the tapestry by a trilobite, a jellyfish and a worm.

Ordovician

41 million years

21 rows

Represented in the tapestry by arandaspis (an early fish) and orthoceras (an armoured squid-like creature).

Silurian

25 million years

13 rows

Represented in the tapestry by cooksonia (an early land plant) and a sea-scorpion.

Devonian

60 million years

30 rows

Represented in the tapestry by hynerpeton (a genus of amphibian-like tetrapods) and stethacanthus (a primitive shark).

Carboniferous

61 million years

31 rows

Represented in the tapestry by meganeura monyi (a giant dragonfly)

Permian

46 million years

23 rows

Represented in the tapestry by a dimetrodon.

Triassic

51 million years

26 rows

Represented in the tapestry by coelophysis (an early dinosaur).

Jurassic

56 million years

28 rows

Represented in the tapestry by stegosaurus.

Cretaceous

80 million years

40 rows

Represented in the tapestry by tyrannosaurus rex and an early bird.

Paleogene

42 million years

21 rows

Represented in the tapestry by basilosaurus (an early whale).

Neogene

21 million years

11 rows

Represented in the tapestry by panthera blytheae (the oldest big cat fossil ever found).

Quaternary

2.5 million years

1 row

Not represented by anything in the tapestry because one row is not much to work with.

Total is 376 rows