One afternoon I saw an Ictiosaurus excavation on the Discovery Channel and decided it would be convenient if I had some sort of timeline, on which I could put dates and facts about dinosaurs and the universe, to see things in the right proportions. I thought it would be an interesting way to spend this Friday afternoon so I started off graphical designing something and later on realizing I needed something more flexible to cope with all the changing dates and facts, which is something that occurs frequently in researching the science of things that happened a long, long, very long time ago, so I decided to develop a computer program, and 4 days/50 hours work later I had build something I could call a Univers(al) Timeline Renderer. This computer program uses a convenient updatable datafile to render one or more timelines in which you're able to include all the facts of the universe you wish to include in. Also it's universal enough to be used as a, for example "Star Wars, Trek or whatever-your-favorite-scifi/fantasy-is Timeline" or even a "History of Food and Boxing Timeline" if you wish, and can render it at any size and scale. For example, it's able to render a 10 kilometers wide timeline provided you have a suitable printer and computer which can cope with this.

This program was developed on Linux in Perl using ImageMagick to render the graphics. A desktop-sized render, demonstrating the universe from the big-bang on to the annihilation of our sun, the evolution of the solar-system, life on earth, the dinosaurs etc. can be viewed by clicking on the image to the left.

A lot of the work involving this particular timeline lies in gathering all know facts and checking them, so that's why this one will never be finished, and there are most likely things in this timeline that some people won't agree with (though I tried to be reasonably accurate).