Timeline+of+Beads

Timeline of Beads



[|Great Story Beads] are used to symbolize the entire 14 billion year story of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. In 2004, Connie Barlow, strung a set of beads (worn as a double-loop necklace) that symbolizes in more detail just the 65 million year story of the North American continent, since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now, whenever she goes into classes and presents the [|North America Story for children], she uses the beads (and a [|chart of animal pictures]) rather than a script to tell the story. The timeline is presented below. But first, here are a few pictures of the beads, and what they signify:

Bears, felid cats, and mastodons immigrate to North America from Asia during the Miocene epoch. Small **green spacer beads** distinguish the Miocene from other epochs in the Cenozoic Era. The small **red beads** surrounding the bear and cat beads signify carnivores.
 * Golden beads surround** the brown nutlike bead, signifying that the coevolution of squirrels and nut trees during the Oligocene epoch (some 32 million years ago) happened right here in North America. **Blue spacer beads** are used to mark the Oligocene, which is significantly cooler (blue cube) than the previous warm Eocene epoch. Seasonality increases, and spurs the evolution of deciduous trees (autumn red-color tree bead).


 * Blue beads** surround the four creatures who floated (or flew) across seawater to enter North America. Frogs, toads, and whiptail lizards floated north from isolated South America on whole trees washed out to sea. Raven (black bead) flew into all the continents (except South America), after it originated in Australia.

The Miocene (**bright green spacer beads**) was marked by the evolution of three important plant types: cactus in the Americas (big yellow bead, surrounded by **gold to mark North American origination**; kelp forests in cool coastal seawaters; and modern grassland ecosystems.

The Pliocene epoch (**purple spacer beads**) includes a momentous event in American history: the rise of the Isthmus of Panama, connecting South America to North America for the first time in more than 70 million years. The event is both a crisis and opportunity (**red and sparkle bead**). Now bears and deer and wolves and cats can expand their range southward, while porcupines, possums, armadillos, and giant ground sloths expand north. This "Great American Interchange" ultimately results in the **extinction (black bead)** of many large South American mammals, brought down either by disease or competition with the new immigrants from the North. Two million years ago, the Pliocene ends, and the **Pleistocene (white spacer beads)** begins, ushering in the continental glaciers of the Ice Age.