Communicating evolution through animation - old and the new

I'm back from the conference and have barely survived a grueling teaching day. So things will soon get to normal here on the blog.

Here is a video showing evolution in 5 minutes and 48 seconds (tip from openculture)



I'm not sure how useful this video is. Perhaps with an audio track it becomes amazing, but it seems to show without much motivation (especially towards the latter part). The timing clock, though, is good. In contrast check out this simple animation from Sagan's Cosmos and see how effective this is:


and of course, somebody had a brilliant idea of combining Sagan's words and animation with the more recent one (top) for an interesting result:


Enjoy!