Focusing on early events in Earth's 4.5 billion-year-history, this exhibition zone illustrates the time when the planet took shape around a molten iron core through the earliest signs of life, and up to the present.

Evidence of the evolution of Earth's atmosphere is given by a 2.7-billion-year-old specimen of a banded iron formation from Ontario, Canada. As single-celled organisms began generating oxygen through photosynthesis, iron and silica minerals in brilliant shades of red precipitated out of the oceans. The iron bands stopped forming once the atmosphere and ocean were saturated with oxygen, roughly 1.7 billion years ago. Other examples of this nascent period include stromatolites, fossil rocks from West Africa which were formed by blue-green algae some 900 million years ago. Once Earth was organized into layers — core, mantle, crust, ocean, and atmosphere — the planet began to take on the familiar topography that we know today.