Introduction -- Birth of a planet -- Earth's oldest materials -- Geological dating -- The oldest rocks -- The early atmosphere -- The evolving hydrosphere -- Layered earth -- Probing earth's interior -- Tectonic earth -- The molten core -- "D double-prime" -- Exploring the mantle -- The base of the crust -- Oceanic crust -- Long-lived continents -- Earth's continental rocks -- Continental rifting -- Making mountains -- Tectonic uplift -- Glacial puzzles -- Earthquakes and plate tectonics -- What makes faults slip? -- A case study in volcanism -- Island arc volcanoes -- Hot spot volcanoes -- Earth's greatest eruptions -- First fossils? -- LUCA -- Controversial origins -- Rising oxygen levels -- From simple to complex life -- Rodinia -- Snowball earth -- The phosphorus effect -- Gondwana and Pangea -- Mysterious Ediacarans -- The first animals -- Secrets of the sponge genome -- The Doushantuo embryos -- Life in the Cambrian seas -- Soft bodies from the Ordovician -- Avalonia -- Ordovician boom and bust -- Living on the land -- Oxygen booms and growth spurts -- Four feet on the ground -- The fossils of East Kirkton -- Joggins fossil cliffs -- Coal forests and glaciation -- Early Permian life -- The great dying -- Triassic survivors -- Rise of the dinosaurs -- Late Triassic life -- Life in Triassic seas -- Mongolian mammals -- Africa's giant dinosaurs -- Australia's polar dinosaurs -- India's journey north -- Evolution of flowering plants -- Sauropod puzzles -- Linking birds and dinosaurs -- Dinosaur eggs and babies -- The end of the Mesozoic -- The Cenozoic recovery -- Primate beginnings -- PETM : the great warming -- The Great Rift Valley -- Changing climates of the past -- The Australopithecine clan -- The real "Great Flood" -- The Quaternary Ice Age -- Genus homo -- The first art -- Neanderthal mysteries -- Unexpected cousins -- The younger Dryas -- Megafloods -- The Holocene rebound -- Domestication of plants and animals -- Disappearing megafauna -- Biodiversity -- Extremophiles -- The census of marine life -- Human overkill -- The carbon dioxide record -- Climate change and mountain erosion -- Changing sea levels -- Habitats on the move -- Danger from the soil? -- Freshwater challenges -- Does coal have a future? -- Atmospheric pollution -- Ocean hypoxia -- Energy futures -- The Athabasca tar sands -- Threat from the skies -- Future sea levels -- Future tectonics -- The fate of the earth -- Glossary and timeline.