Hi HN, I built this. It's been posted several times before, so I can answer some common questions:
How does this work?
I adapted GPlates [1], an academic project that creates desktop software for geologists to investigate plate tectonic data.
Is the geocoding accurate?
Even though plate tectonic models return precise results, you should consider the plots approximate within ~100km. In my tests I found that model results can vary significantly. I chose this model because it is widely cited and covers the greatest length of time.
How should I interpret the maps/colors?
The graphics that wrap the globe are provided by Dr. Christopher Scotese, a geologist who runs the PALEOMAP project. You can learn more about the project and the creation of the rasters here [2]. You might also notice some old national borders. I just work with what I can get!
Why can't it look up my location?
Your location probably didn't exist at the time, geologically speaking. Try switching to closer to present day (e.g. 66 Mya)
Where are all the dinosaurs?
Despite the title of this post, the visualization isn't really meant to show an exhaustive list of dinosaurs or fossils (the list doesn't even show on mobile). If you want to dig into data on fossils near you, check out the Paleobiology Database Navigator [3].
Yeah same - I think the post title was recently edited because the original title was very explicit about it showing you dinosaurs that were found in your area. I live in Miami, so I typed that in and was waiting to see the cousins of all the strange cold-blooded oddities I see everyday and it was exactly as you describe.
I recently saw one of those flappy neck lizards maybe 3 months ago so was expecting to see that dino from Jurassic Park when he yeets that fat guy out of existence but instead just got the red dot.
As the instructions in the bottom suggest, arrow keys can be used to skip over the times, which was good. It would be neat try having the up/down change the time (as they currently do) and left/right (instead of also navigating the times) do east/west rotation (or vice versa).
It allows for north to always be up without causing mayhem when you try to move over the poles. The alternative is to allow free movement but no guarantee on orientation which can get confusion on things like this.
I have relatives with property along a river in Bath county Virginia. Across the river stands a ~200ft high cliff with caves that go for miles. I was told that they were formed by the ocean. That explanation bothered me because the caves face west. Now it makes sense! They have also discovered seashell fossils by the river!
Earth’s land and water hemispheres [1] were particularly stark in contrast back in the time of the dinosaurs. Are there geological theories as to how the asymmetry formed? Could major impact events from astronomical objects have played a role?
> The current configuration of continents is unlikely to be the last. Supercontinents have formed several times in Earth's history, only to be split off into new continents. Right now for instance, Australia is inching toward Asia, and the eastern portion of Africa is slowly peeling off from the rest of the continent.
> Based on the emergence of other supercontinents in the Precambrian supereon (4.5 billion to 541 million years ago), it appears that supercontinents occur periodically every 750 million years, according to a 2012 study in the journal Gondwana Research (opens in new tab).
> Most scientists believe that the supercontinent cycle is largely driven by circulation dynamics in the mantle, according to a 2010 article in the Journal of Geodynamics (opens in new tab).
Dang, wish this title was updated to be less misleading. I spent way too long looking for functionality that didn't exist. The author (not same person as poster) posted in the comments:
> Where are all the dinosaurs? Despite the title of this post, the visualization isn't really meant to show an exhaustive list of dinosaurs or fossils (the list doesn't even show on mobile).
That said, this is a really cool visualization of how the water fill and plates evolved over time. Love it!
If anyone wants to suggest a more accurate and neutral title, we can maybe change it. I don't understand what's wrong with the current title ("Which dinosaurs lived in your hometown?")
Edit: I think I get it now and have changed the title above.
Only 600 millions years ago my Central European city was a beach front to the mega-Ocean. Would be sweet to see it but the lack of infrastructure could get annoying.
Reading through the descriptions of each time period, it suddenly struck me that I had no idea Earth had so many mass extinctions. It's a bit mind-blowing that the one that put an end to the dinosaurs was not even the worst (by percentage of species killed off).
I also somehow hadn't appreciated that multi-cellular animals existed before multi-cellular plants.
Are there sci-fi stories with the premise that a character wakes up transported to a different planet except it’s later revealed that it’s actually Earth in a distant time?
Not quite what you are looking for, but the Malazan series has some stories spanning extremely large time scales through which multiple intelligent species evolve into existence and fade away.
It is by far, the best series I've read. Book 1 is hard to get into, and doesn't reward the reader as much, but stick with the series. It's worth it.
Stephen Erikson is an anthropologist and archaeologist which explains a lot of the deep historical depth to MBotF. Apparently he went on a dig in Mongolia between books nine and ten and almost died from a stomach bug and then a spider bite!
> And there was even a fear of dying before I could finish it! I remember being struck by a quote I read somewhere, when Robert Jordan was in his last few years, at a signing where he signed a book for an elderly woman who expressed a fear of her dying before he finished the series. And of course the bitter irony being Jordan himself dying before he could finish the series. And the closer I got to it, there was a disastrous decision to do some archaeology in Mongolia between books nine and ten, and then that almost killing me, from a stomach bug, and then a spider bite, it just started getting ridiculous. And then I realised if I keeled over in Mongolia between book nine and ten, wherever my gravestone was in the world people would annually piss on it, so I thought okay, I got to get this thing finished. And came back, I was living in Falmouth at the time, so I came back to Cornwall and just wrote my ass off and got it done.
I’d argue that those lines were mysterious until the subsequent closing shot that functions as the visual punch line. At least ten-year-old me didn’t get the earlier hints.
The whole series of movies (well, the pre-2000 iterations) was recently free to watch on YouTube. They're all cheesy but the original one holds up reasonably well.
Feels like a movie-length version of a classic Twilight Zone episode, which makes sense, considering Rod Serling wrote the first draft of the film's script.
Not a planet of the apes traveler trope, but in his “book of the new Sun” trilogy Gene Wolfe leaves it as an exercise for the reader to figure out that it’s set in a far-far future South America.
But yeah the river is a big hint. The Paraná in Argentina is a good candidate, and it’s easy to rule out other big delta rivers like the Nile or Mississippi. Iirc Severian also uses the word “pampas” for plains, and at some point we learn there’s a jungle zone to the north, with an arid region beyond.
In Doctor Who, one of the Series 12 (2020) stories had that twist, and what stands this story apart from almost all other uses of this trope is that the twist was not an ending, and we see how characters process that reveal.
Please be careful if you gonna read TV tropes page linked in a sibling comment, as the title of that episode is in the list of examples on that page in Live-Action TV section, so you can accidentally spoil yourself all the fun.
It doesn't seem to. It does, however, change the epoch description in the bottom left, which is well-written and informative. The arrow keys are cool for moving through eras.
That’s what it says for my hometown unless I switch to a more recent year. The error message is a bit confusing I think, the tip to change the year isn’t super obvious.
Interestingly, Barcelona doesn’t show up until you hit 0 years ago, so perhaps it’s location is extremely recent on the tectonic scale?
Bloody plate tectonics! When you watch geo[thingie] at this speed you start to appreciate how there is no such thing as terra firma. Take the UK and Ireland - thanks to sea level changes it expands and contracts pretty madly and that's only change in one dimension. At several points it was part of the European land mass and faster than you can say Brexit the Dogger bank floods over and Neanderthals got wet feet.
If you also tried to follow land, you'd have to account for subduction and whatever the opposite of that is on continental scales and land created by volcanoes and lost by volcanoes exploding etc on a smaller scale.
Absolutely. I'm certainly not a geologist and I know it's clearly not a 1:1 mapping, but certainly some thing can be said about, say the India shaped floating land mass that drifts towards where India is located in the past 100 million years and if you wanted to say where Mumbai was, the answer, if there is one, is probably found somewhere on that giant island and not at the exact place it is today
I also wasn't seeing anything, until I used "⌘ A" to select all text, and noticed that the list of animals or plants for the city I selected was displayed at the top left, in white text over a white background. Selecting all made it slightly more visible, enough for me to read the text.
Thanks for the screenshot. There might some weird three.js/webgl thing going on, because that background is supposed to be black with stars. Any errors in the console? Just put out a potential fix.
I think it's interesting that at 260 million years ago, Europe and the eastern US seem to be at relatively the same distance as today (maybe a little closer), but you have most of Africa wedged in the middle of them.
This is great in theory but in practice we just don't have enough fossils for it to be truly interesting. It's more like "Which dinosaurs lived seven hundred miles away from your hometown?"
Lame, no worky. Maybe cuz I’m browsing on a phone instead of computer? I get no list, the only thing that changes with time period is a general description.
There must have been a lot in Los Angeles, given the oil derricks. All that liquid T-Rex goodness. No idea where this hunk of land was 60+ million years ago.
You're probably just making a joke but in case others are wondering, your SUV is almost certainly not powered by liquified T-Rexs. Instead, most hydrocarbons we have today come from plants ie plankton-like creatures. Also, the position of hydrocarbons is not dictated by the population at that point in time on the earth's surface. Instead, think of the earth like a giant porous sponge with the occasional impervious rock formation that traps the liquid. The hydrocarbons accumulate in those traps over time and lead to the reservoirs we now tap for oil.
I bet they mean birds, aka modern dinosaurs. This is a good 'aka' because dinosaur made baby dinosaurs who grew up to make their own baby dinosaurs. Each generation was slightly different than the last and after millions of years, the baby dinosaurs were named birds!
Well any dinosaur that existed and flew wasn't actually a dinosaur but rather a pterosaur. However I did a quick spot check and realize that modern day birds didn't evolved from pterosaurs but rather from dinosaurs surprised. So I stand corrected.
And just to emphasize: This is nitpicky, but it is correct. In the phylogenic sense, birds are dinosaurs. It's not that there used to be dinosaurs, some of which evolved into birds and there are no dinosaurs left anymore, but rather there are about 18000 extant dinosaur species in the world today, it's just that they have feathers and most of them fly.
We still have 3M who up until recently had a business formal dress code for all employees. I know several friends who turned down jobs because they were not cool with having to wear a suit the entire day they were coding.
It it doesn't answer the question, "Which dinosaurs lived in my hometown?"
Seriously, I clicked on the link thinking I'd be able to get a list of the dinosaurs that are believed to have lived in my hometown. As cool as this link is, it doesn't answer "Which dinosaurs lived in my hometown?"
Depends on the place. Enter a town/city where dinosaurs fossils were found and it will show a couple. But even the few fossil hotbeds I checked will only show 2 or 3.
How does this work? I adapted GPlates [1], an academic project that creates desktop software for geologists to investigate plate tectonic data.
Is the geocoding accurate? Even though plate tectonic models return precise results, you should consider the plots approximate within ~100km. In my tests I found that model results can vary significantly. I chose this model because it is widely cited and covers the greatest length of time.
How should I interpret the maps/colors? The graphics that wrap the globe are provided by Dr. Christopher Scotese, a geologist who runs the PALEOMAP project. You can learn more about the project and the creation of the rasters here [2]. You might also notice some old national borders. I just work with what I can get!
Why can't it look up my location? Your location probably didn't exist at the time, geologically speaking. Try switching to closer to present day (e.g. 66 Mya)
Where are all the dinosaurs? Despite the title of this post, the visualization isn't really meant to show an exhaustive list of dinosaurs or fossils (the list doesn't even show on mobile). If you want to dig into data on fossils near you, check out the Paleobiology Database Navigator [3].
[1] https://www.gplates.org
[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-q0WIa7ofISFHyBe4UxvN8DIPs8...
[3] https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/