If you don’t care about birds flitting about, here’s another tool, TimeTree. It’ll let you look up the divergence time between any two species, in this case I just chose to compare myself with my house spiders.
700 million years sounds about right, but that’s just the general time since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates. Our shared ancestor would have been some nondescript little worm.
If you’re arguing with Kent Hovind, it might be useful to know that the last common ancestor of humans and bananas lived about 1.5 billion years ago; same time since we diverged from the amoeba. The paleo-proterozoic was a busy time! Or, at least the seas were full of eukaryotes then.
Tangential, okay, totally off topic sorry but happy World Octopus Day everyone!
https://www.ecocalendar.eu/OctopusDay
Yup that’s October 8th which seems apt – no doubt chosen as such.
Should be August; because octopodes are so awesomely august critters. Oh yeah and it’s the actual eighth month for some dang reason.
And hey, it’s created at Temple University, which I remember you have a connection to. (I work nearby, they have many posters on the walls there for Timetree, and for the BBC documentary it was used in).
That is a fantastic website.
Unfortunately, the form-based interface doesn’t let me ask the most relevant question:
How long has it been since Homo sapiens diverged from Homo Kenthovid?
@2. seachange : “Oh yeah and it’s the actual eighth month for some dang reason.”
If memory serves julius ceasar is to blame.. for that and for turning the claws of Scorpius into the constellation Libra too.
Huh, turns out it might actually go back to being Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome’s fault :