Tools:🔊 Tip: use the read-aloud button to hear the page.
🧭 Explorer's badge
History
Think like a historian — using the animals as our clues.
🩺 Vet-informed📚 National Curriculum-linked💚 Therapy-ready🇬🇧 British-made
📜 What is history — and what does a historian do?
History is the study of the past. A historian is a person who investigates it.
Historians don't just learn dates. They put events in order, ask why things happened, and use clues (called evidence) to work out what was true.
On this page you'll meet real facts, build a timeline, learn a historian's skills, and test yourself — using animals as our way in.
Put on your explorer's hat. Let's investigate. 🔎
🕰️ Put it in order — a timeline
Chronology means putting events in the order they happened. Notice the huge jump between deep time and human history.
🦕 Deep time — millions of years ago
252–66 million years ago
The age of the dinosaurs (the Mesozoic Era). They died out about 66 million years ago — long before any people.
🧑 Human history — thousands of years ago, up to today
about 15,000 years ago
Dogs become our first animal friends, tamed from wolves.
about 11,000 years ago
Farming begins. Sheep and goats are among the first farm animals.
about 3100 BCE
Ancient Egypt begins. Egyptians honour cats and the cat goddess Bastet.
1761
The world's first school for vets opens in Lyon, France.
1828
London Zoo opens — the world's first scientific zoo.
1831–1836
Charles Darwin sails around the world on HMS Beagle, studying animals.
1842
Scientist Richard Owen invents the word "dinosaur".
1943
The Dickin Medal is created to honour brave animals in war.
💡 Think: "BCE" means Before the Common Era — we count backwards. So 3100 BCE was over 5,000 years ago. The dinosaurs are on a totally different scale: millions of years, not thousands.
🐾 Explore 7 topics
Each card has a true fact and a question to wonder about. Turn on 🎓 Challenge tasks at the top for a harder task on every card.
🔍 How historians think
These are the real skills historians use. They are called disciplinary concepts — and you can practise them here.
📚 Key words to know
A knowledge organiser: the important words for this topic and what they mean.
🧠 Test yourself
Retrieval practice helps facts stick. Try to answer first, then press Show answer to check.
🚀 Do an activity
Pick a card and press Open. It tells you what you'll do before you start.
👩🏫 For teachers & parents — curriculum links
This page is mapped to the National Curriculum for History (England). It builds substantive knowledge (facts) and disciplinary knowledge (how we know), not just themed activities.
KS1: the lives of significant individuals who contributed to national and international achievements (e.g. Charles Darwin); events beyond living memory that are significant.
KS2: the achievements of the earliest civilisations, with a study of Ancient Egypt; a theme in British history extending chronological knowledge beyond 1066 (e.g. animals in wartime and farming).
Disciplinary aims: chronology and historical terms; asking historically valid questions; understanding how we know about the past through sources and evidence; change and continuity, cause and consequence, similarity and difference, and significance.
Pedagogy built in: a knowledge organiser, retrieval-practice questions with answers, and tiered challenge tasks for stretch and SEN access.
Want it on paper? Print a clean fact sheet with the key words and the quiz (answers included).