Geological time converter
Convert between Ma, Ga and plain years, and see where your date falls if Earth’s whole history were squeezed into one calendar year.
That's about the same as the end of the dinosaurs. On a calendar of Earth’s whole history, that is 5.306 days before the end.
What it means
How long ago is that?
Dates follow the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Boundaries shift a little as dating methods improve.
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Learn
Three things worth knowing
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Humans arrive on 31 December
Compress Earth’s history into one year and our species appears at about 23:25 on New Year’s Eve. All of recorded history is the last 30 seconds.
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Reading the layers
Before radioactive dating, geologists could only say which layer was older. Radiometric dating from the 1900s put real numbers on the sequence.
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Ma and mya
Ma means a point in the past; Myr means a length of time. The dinosaurs died 66 Ma ago, having lived for 165 Myr.
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Background
About geological time
Geologists count backwards in Ma (millions of years ago) and Ga (billions). The Earth is 4,540 Ma old, the dinosaurs died 66 Ma ago, and our species is about 0.3 Ma old.