Imagine stepping out of your front door and coming face-to-face with a towering Tyrannosaurus rex or watching a herd of Triceratops grazing in your backyard. That’s not really possible (at least with current technology), but there might have been one or two dinosaurs in your backyard some time ago.
This innovative online platform shows you just that. It gives a 3D view of the Earth and how it changed in the past, starting 750 million years ago and bringing the ancient world of dinosaurs right to your doorstep.
The Earth’s surface seems static and unmoving but in geological time, it moves quite a lot. Due to tectonic plate movement, the surface of the planet constantly shifts. This movement is on the scale of a few centimeters per year, but over millions of years, this adds up. Rewind to over 100 million years ago, and you wouldn’t even recognize the Earth.
This is another nice aspect of this platform.
The site, dubbed Ancient Earth and developed by California paleontologist Ian Webster, shows you what the Earth’s surface was like in the past. You can go to any period in the past and click. It also gives you the option to enter any town or city and plot which dinosaurs and fossils have been confirmed around it.
“I built this by adapting GPlates (https://www.gplates.org), an academic project providing desktop software for geologists to investigate plate tectonic data. I’m amazed that geologists collected enough data to actually plot my home 750M years ago, so I thought you all would enjoy it too,” Webster said upon launching the platform.
So, you can basically go in and search by location and period. You can also search by dinosaur. Whether you’re a die-hard dinosaur enthusiast or simply curious about the natural history of your region, this website promises an educational and exhilarating journey back in time, revealing the lost worlds that lie just beneath our feet.
What’s even more exciting is that we’ve only just scratched the surface of our geological knowledge. The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that our planet’s history is far more dynamic and interconnected than we realize. There’s a world of geology just waiting to be uncovered.
