Example sentences of "[prep] [adj] million years " in BNC.
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1 | He named it Latimeria and informed an astonished world that a creature thought to have been extinct for 70 million years was still alive . |
2 | They have come around to accepting them , but on the dubious grounds that the palaeontological evidence now proves that the earliest hominids arose in Africa about 5–6 million years ago and that Ramapithecus was not a hominid . |
3 | Thus it was that the dinosaurs were astonishingly successful for 140 million years — a period of dominance in which the mammals of the day ( and there were plenty of mammals about ) were pushed into the background , or at least into holes in the ground and in trees . |
4 | So ‘ fit ’ and so well adapted were they , and so successfully did they dominate their terrestrial environment , that they survived for 140 million years . |
5 | At last , after another million years persuading David she would be all right when she had taken some aspirin , she was alone , in her own flat . |
6 | Others had fewer lenses of remarkably efficient construction ; photographs have actually been taken ( p. 86 ) using these ancient lenses in a camera — and they still focus precisely after 400 million years or so . |
7 | Up until about 100 million years ago , then , South America was joined to Africa in the east and to Antarctica in the south . |
8 | There , lying among trilobites , brachiopods and bristle worms , in the mud of the seas of 550 million years ago that had yet to see a finned or backboned swimmer , has been found the impression of a creature very similar indeed to the living lancelet . |
9 | He found six different amphibians — more than had been found in the whole of Europe in rocks of 330 million years old . |
10 | That is why we need history presented as it is in this book : not just as the brief flicker of time since the industrial revolution or since the invention of writing , but as the 40,000 years of modern thought and language , and the sweep of six million years since we were born as the third chimpanzee . |
11 | Other forms of life on earth today seem much more closely to resemble what one knows , based on the fossil record , to have been their evolutionary ancestors of many million years past . |
12 | Developments included the realistic estimation of 11 million years as the likely time required for the production of an erosion surface and Linton ( 1957 ) had shown that the time scale used by some as a frame of reference for landscape evolution was too long . |
13 | On a time-scale which may not coincide exactly with our present scientific calculations of geological time , they say that the cycle commences with a period of 1.7 million years when the power of the Life Force is immeasurably stronger and more evident in physical affairs than it is today . |
14 | Up to twenty vanished basic phyla of soft-bodied creatures have been identified from the fossil record of 520 million years ago — all utterly different from anything known today . |
15 | You are now a vertical mile below the rim and the rocks have been dated to the immense age of 2000 million years . |
16 | This savannah covered huge areas as the great forests of 15 million years ago decreased following global changes in climate . |
17 | If this were true , and if oceanic crust was being generated at all the oceanic ridges in the world at this rate throughout geological history , then the entire present oceanic crust could have been formed in a mere couple of hundred million years , and therefore , without some other kind of process acting , there would be a vast quantity of spare oceanic crust lying around . |
18 | Kilimanjaro for three million years . |
19 | It seems like one million years BC ( Before Courtney ) |
20 | Has n't changed for sixty million years . |
21 | They began about 55 million years ago and now live everywhere from desert to rainforest . |
22 | But this is curious : we are , after all , dealing with 140 million years of almost perfect adaptive survival . |
23 | This would explain why single-celled organisms appeared 3500 years ago , but complex creatures such as mammals and reptiles did not appear until 500 million years ago . |
24 | Since we are unlikely yet to have discovered the oldest fossils of all , we can reckon that life started well before 3000 million years ago and as a rough guide , it will serve to let one day represent ten million years . |
25 | The earliest evidence of stone tools — modified or used by hominids — does not appear in the archaeological record until 2 million years ago . |
26 | Trace the history of the world from 4500 million years ago to the present day . |
27 | If this sediment were carbonate-rich , it might imply a short cycle time because carbonate deep-sea sediment was rare before 600 million years ago . |
28 | Ruby sighed , ‘ One thing has n't changed in three million years . |
29 | One visionary speaker at the British Association ( science ) meeting in 1984 spoke of the likelihood of rats the size of wolves inheriting the Earth in 50 million years time , when Man — in all probability — is no longer on the scene . |
30 | Once in 40 million years , once in one million years — what are the chances of a major accident at the planned Sizewell pressurised-water reactor in Suffolk ( This Week , 11 November , p 343 ) ? |