Side project

A map of the dinosaurs

Where and when dinosaur fossils have actually been dug up, across the roughly 180 million years dinosaurs walked the Earth.

The map screen: an old world map with colourful dots marking dinosaur fossil discoveries, and a timeline slider running along the top. — Set to about 72 million years ago here, not long before the asteroid.

A detail card open for a single fossil discovery, showing what it is, roughly when it lived, and where the information came from. — Click any dot to see what it is, roughly when it lived, and where that information comes from.

A browsable dinosaur family tree, from broad groups down to individual species. — A family tree you can browse, from big groups like armoured dinosaurs down to individual species.

A daily dinosaur-guessing puzzle called Dinordle, styled after the word game Wordle. — There's also a daily guessing game called Dinordle. Like Wordle, but each guess narrows down a dinosaur instead of a word.

I built a map that plots dinosaur fossil finds across deep time. Drag the timeline through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, about 252 to 66 million years ago, and the continents redraw to their reconstructed positions for that age, with the fossils known from that period shown on top.

Each dot marks a place a fossil was dug up, not a guess at where the animal roamed. Anything reconstructed or uncertain gets labelled as such.

Explore the map ↗