This chapter documents early views of the age of the Earth and theories about how geological features of the Earth came to be, including the fossil record. It then explores early ideas about the evolution of life on Earth. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, notably Anaximander, Empedocles, and Lucretius, espoused several views that life on Earth as we see it evolved from earlier forms of life. These ideas were lost during the Middle Ages but were resurrected in the Italian Renaissance with the rediscovery of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. In the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, zoological gardens and museums prominently displayed the biological diversity of creatures both past and present, and the curators of said institutions prominently theorized about the mutability of species. These included Georges Buffon, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Franz Unger, and Robert Chambers.