What did Earth look like X million years ago? | Hacker News Reader

What did Earth look like X million years ago?

dinosaurpictures.org

509 pointshwayne111 comments

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].

[1] https://www.gplates.org

[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-q0WIa7ofISFHyBe4UxvN8DIPs8...

[3] https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/

This is one of the coolest web apps I've seen... awesome work!

This is really cool, where is SnowBall earth at ~700M years ago though? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

Is the rotation lock when viewing North/South Pole intentional?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock

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.

one suggestion is that rotation should be disabled by default, disable itself when you manually move the globe, or at least not hidden behind a toggle

otherwise very cool

I found the rotation inconvenient as well.

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).

This doesn't appear to work for me. When I enter a city name it just places a red sphere on the globe. Nothing about dinosaurs.

It was clickbait

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.

Where can I file a JIRA ticket?

I clicked around on soemthing and got a list. Around me was some huge whale Dino.

First I had to set the date to the Jurassic.

they don't appears when I'm using my cell photne but they do when I'm on my computer. also you have to selct a date when thre was dinosaurs

Would it be possible to show the Earth at X million years in the future?

Thanks for building this! Is there any way to predict/visualize what it'll look like X years into the future? That'd be pretty cool to look at.

One of the neat bits from this is going to 340 Mya and look at where the Appalachian mountain range runs.

You can hike part of the Appalachian trail in Spain https://www.geologiadesegovia.info/the-international-appalac... and Ireland https://iatulsterireland.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Appalachian_Trai...

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?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres

In digging on it, Ancient Supercontinents and the Paleogeography of Earth looks to be an interesting book https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128185339/ancient-sup...

This appears to be part of a geologic scale cycle - https://www.livescience.com/38218-facts-about-pangaea.html

> 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).

Water/land hemispheres would then be an artifact of that cycle. Given that cycle, it will happen again - https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-earth-s-next-s...

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!

The coal fields in the present-day United States, Britain, Spain, France, and Silesia were all once part of the contiguous Appalachian range.

In one of those interesting coincidences, the coal miners of the British Isles immigrated to the Appalachia area in the US to mine coal.

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.

I never realized until seeing this 3D globe that literally an entire side of the earth only had water.

I've seen drawings of Pangaea before but never in a 3-dimensional sphere.

Just interesting to see and entire 1/2 of the earth with nothing but ocean.

I wonder how common this is on other planets.

We're not too far off right now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres

I remember reading about how it's periodic, continents split apart then come together again in a cycle. Not in the same configuration obviously.

To be pedantic about it, nearly 3/4 of the earth are still nothing but ocean!

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.

Very fun project.

The in and out shallow seas in N. America provide a lot of beachfront ... under water ... beach front and on and off again activity.

Amazing how much a few hundred million years will change things.

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.

For living in "Dinosaurland", the list of dinosaurs that lived near me is pretty low

Same with anything around the Badlands in Albert ... 2 or 3 listed.

Ok boyz... we're going digging in the weekend then!

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?

You mean besides Planet of the Apes?

[Spoiler Alert:] Original 1968 “Planet of the Apes”? It's a great visual reveal in the last moments of the film; no dialog needed.

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.

> It's a great visual reveal in the last moments of the film; no dialog needed.

Dialog is present and very famous, though. ("You maniacs! You blew it up!")

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.

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.

[TVTrope Warning] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarthAllAlong

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.

You might want to check out the Time Odyssey series. It was written by Arthur C Clarke (along with Stephen Baxter) and deals with similar themes.

Land of the Lost. I suggest the Wil Farrell movie version.

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.

what are the clues for south america. The river?

The hints are pretty sparse because Severian doesn’t know where he is any more than the reader does, but Wolfe confirmed it in an interview here: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm

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.

If I change the date in the top right, does it change the list of dinosaurs or just change the map?

It would be nice to show small pictures of the dinosaurs instead of just links to the main page of each dinosaur (that has a few pictures).

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.

I like how this has former Yugoslavia (including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia) borders :)

Belgrade only got rid of the water when dinosaurs were already extinct according to this.

Not seeing any dinosaur info on mobile. Using Android and FF browser

If you are using a computersaurus with a 4:3 screen like me, you will have to zoom in to get the list of fossils.

I can't help but take depictions of dinosaurs like https://dinosaurpictures.org/Streptospondylus-pictures at face value, until I catch myself and remember they may be quite wrong considering we are limited to fossils: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/science-m... (tl;dr https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natashaumer/dinosaur-an...).

See here for the dinosaurs by region [1]

[1]: https://dinosaurpictures.org/

These are all renderings. Why no photos?

Photos of fossils?

> These are all renderings. Why no photos?

Alas! It would seem the Time Travel machine somehow erases the photos during the return trip, so renderings is all they can do.

It's actually a licensing issue, it turns out.

Some what complicated by jurisdictional and statutes of limitations issues.

Thanks! I wish this had a little finer geolocation than just "north america". The webgl site in the main link was a no-go.

Could not resolve location for "Barcelona, Catalonia, ES"

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?

Really. It found Yeovil (UK) which is smaller than your neighbour - BDN!

It'd be nice if it followed land and not just location.

I'm sure it's more complicated then I think, but this model is kinda silly

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

There should be something better than this.

nothing is showing up for me. luckily i already know the answer: bryozoans, bryozoans, and more bryozoans

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.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/VQjfvQZ.png

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.

No errors, but two regular log messages and two warnings:

    webParams: {startingYear: 260, surfacePoints: Array(0), camera: {…}}
    (warning) THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture has been deprecated. Use THREE.TextureLoader() instead.
    > Jb.loadTexture @ three.min.js:990
    > createSphere…
    lastAddressFailed true
    (warning) THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture has been deprecated. Use THREE.TextureLoader() instead.
    > Jb.loadTexture @ three.min.js:990
    > createClouds…

Edit: I figured something was missing so I tried disabling uBlock Origin in case it was blocking some assets, but that didn't help.

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?"

There have never been dinosaurs in my town. We've always maintained a big board in both local and regional languages that said "DINOSAURS KEEP OUT".

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.

Try another city. The site didn't show anything for my location.

I always think the waves on Pangea's coast must have been huge. All that wind blowing and no continents to stop the waves from forming.

I just had fun putting a pin into my hometown and discovering that it was at the equator at some point (300 mio years ago)!

Fish, apparently.

Path trace of continental drift for chosen point, across some time window?

If they were still around we would get to see Buffalo fried Fruitadens wings.

Cretaceous FTW. Looks like I’ll need to keep working on my time machine.

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.

They all ran Xfree86

watch Prehistoric Planet - Season 1 to find out

Pat Buchanan.

Anyone else love Dino Dana?

We've still got AT&T and an IBM in my hometown, there's probably even a few PHP web-shops there too!

PHP is more like birds. Technically, they're dinosaurs, but they've evolved and stayed relevant after Perl, etc. went extinct.

I believe you mean they are more like pterosaurs

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.

> Well any dinosaur that existed and flew wasn't actually a dinosaur but rather a pterosaur.

I believe you mean: "but rather a pterosaur or bird".

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.

To be further nitpicky - I believe the current theory is that most dinosaurs did have feathers.

I believe that birds are descendents from theropods and yes phylogenic-wise dinosaurs. However that seems a bit semantic.

Actually no there were no birds in existence while there were dinosaurs only millions of years after their extinction per current evidence.

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.

You must not be referring to their HQ.

Because AT&T is in Texas and IBM is in New York.

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?"

Others are commenting like it does though, I couldn't get a dinosaur list either fwiw.

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.

If you enter a place it will provide a list of fossils potentially nearby.

It seems limited and not quite as cool as as say, showing a field guide of dinos in your area during a time period.

Thats what it does, you can adjust the year at the top

I was expecting to be able to click the globe where I live and see Dinosaur info.

seems you have to use the search for place.

Good to know it wasn't just me who couldn't find an option to answer the actual thing it purports to tell you

Apparently 0 dinosaurs roamed the area around Toronto, Ontario. We weren't even underwater at the time.

That's because the poster made up a clickbait title, which they shouldn't have done.

No, it does list the dinosaurs, it is just a very limited database. Most cities I tried had none but Dallas, TX for example listed a few.

The title of the site is not the submitted title.

This link was extraordinarily fascinating, and I learned a lot but it didn’t deliver on that promise for me, either.

It shows the dinosaurs in a very light grey over the white background. You can find it just below the city search box.

equivalent to spam in its current iteration

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