This animation involves the group from Patrick Henry School of Science and Art and is roughly 100 or so of their creatures, with their own unique ending to the animation- the Ice Age.

Tyler Rhodes, a student in the animation program at Virginia Commonwealth University, wanted to create an evolution animation that wasn’t simply linear, but instead represented the true ‘tree-like’ process. So he enlisted the help of elementary school students and involved them in a type of game. They made sketches based on one original sketch, and allowed the resulting diversity to dictate survival of the fittest to future generations.

So he enlisted the help of elementary school students from William Fox Elementary School and the Patrick Henry School of Science & Art, and involved them in a type of game.

“Much like the whispered game “telephone” where one person whispers a message down the line until it’s very different by the end due to small “mutations” along the way, I would create a game of telephone using visual imagery.”

Tyler began the game by sketching a nondescript salamander-like creature:

He then had various groups of students make copies of this sketch, knowing that the copies would contain subtle differences. He scanned the images and cut them out in Adobe Photoshop, used Adobe After Effects to animate using the "puppet tool" on the drawings to give them that rubbery look. Read the full story here: blogs.scientificamerican.com