Cool digital map shows where your hometown was when dinosaurs roamed the Earth

by Anagha Srikanth | Aug. 3, 2021 | Aug. 03, 2021

Story at a glance

A digital map of the Earth goes back 750 million years through the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Users can enter a city name to see what it looked like several centuries ago.
Ian Webster, the co-founder and lead engineer at Zenysis, helped create the map for the Dinosaur Database.

As scientists try to understand how the world might change in the next few decades, history might have a clue or two.

A digital map of the Earth goes back 750 million years — just a fraction of the 4.5 billion years the planet is estimated to be of age — even before the Cryogenian Period, when glaciers were thought to cover the entire planet. You can jump back to see what the Earth looked like when the first green algae, coral reefs, land animals and dinosaurs appeared on Earth — all the way through when the last dinosaur went extinct.

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Ian Webster, the co-founder and lead engineer at Zenysis, helped create the map for the Dinosaur Database, “the internet’s largest” such database. The project is one of several of Webster’s that map outer space, including a database of all known asteroids, 3-dimensional models and other digital maps.

My Christmas gift for Ancient Earth: fancier 3d pins on the globe https://t.co/yaTwOPu0pB pic.twitter.com/jLvm14KKYL

— Ian Webster (@iwebst) December 25, 2019

The engineer has been updating the map for several years after publishing it in 2018.

Latest project: enter an address and see where it was up to 750 million yrs ago. Screenshot of NYC on Pangaea during mid-Triassic (240Mya): https://t.co/YMNG0FWdXQ #webgl pic.twitter.com/7cyfXR3tP9

— Ian Webster (@iwebst) June 8, 2018