{If I can learn things like this in school then it's all worth it}

Compress the entire 4.6 billion years of geologic time into a single year. On that scale, the oldest Earth rocks we know date from early February. Living things first appeared in the sea in the last week of March. Land plants and animals emerged in late November, and the widespread swamps that formed the Pennsylvania coal deposits flourished for about four days in early December. Dinosaurs became dominant in mid-December but disappeared on the 26th, at about the time the Rocky Mountains were first uplifted. Humanlike creatures appeared sometime during the evening of December 31st, and the most recent continental ice sheets began to recede from the Great Lakes area and from northern Europe about one minute and 15 seconds before midnight on the 31st. Rome ruled the Western world for 5 seconds, from 11:59:45 to 11:59:50. Columbus arrived in America 3 seconds before midnight, and the science of geology was born with the writings of James Hutton just slightly more than one second before the end of our eventful year of years (Geologic Time, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1978)