Credits & Data Sources

Paleodigital Elevation Models (0–540 Ma heightmaps)

Scotese, C.R. and Wright, N.M. (2018). PALEOMAP Paleodigital Elevation Models (PaleoDEMS) for the Phanerozoic.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5460860

Modifications: NetCDF → WebP conversion, resized to 4096×2048, flood-fill coastline cleanup, narrow-strait dilation preservation, Natural Earth mask correction for shallow seas at 0Ma·5Ma

Ocean / marine polygons for shallow-sea correction at 0Ma·5Ma (modern coastline)

Natural Earth — naturalearthdata.com

Modifications: ne_10m_ocean + ne_10m_marine_polys GeoJSON converted to 4096×2048 boolean mask, applied as sea overlay in the final heightmap stage

0–540 Ma temperature / precipitation / wind (55 snapshots, 10 Ma → 109 snapshots interpolated to 5 Ma)

Li, X. et al. (2022). A high-resolution climate simulation dataset for the past 540 million years. Scientific Data, 9, 371.

DOI: 10.1038/s41597-022-01490-4

Modifications: NetCDF → RGB WebP/PNG textures (temp/precip/land fraction/wind), upscaled 192×288 → 4096×2048, linearly interpolated from 10 Ma to 5 Ma

Paleobiology Database (fossil occurrence records)

Peters, S.E. and McClennen, M. (2016). The Paleobiology Database application programming interface. Paleobiology, 42(1), 1-7.

Modifications: Up to 10,000 occurrences sampled per time slice (stratified by class); rotated to paleocoordinates with PyGPlates. The primary reference for each occurrence can be looked up by occurrence ID at paleobiodb.org.

Plate-tectonic coordinate reconstruction (run locally)

Müller, R.D. et al. (2018). GPlates: Building a Virtual Earth Through Deep Time. G-cubed, 19.

DOI: 10.1029/2018GC007584

Modifications: Coordinates pre-computed locally with PyGPlates and stored as static JSON

0–200 Ma coordinate reconstruction + plate boundaries

Seton, M. et al. (2012). Global continental and ocean basin reconstructions since 200 Ma. Earth-Science Reviews, 113.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10596049

200–540 Ma coordinate reconstruction (Scotese 2016 reference frame, aligned with PaleoDEM heightmap)

Scotese, C.R. (2016). PALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlates. Zenodo.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10596609

Modifications: Pre-rotated fossil/city/geo_event coordinates with PyGPlates and stored as static JSON

200–540 Ma plate boundary topology

Müller, R.D. et al. (2022). A tectonic-rules-based mantle reference frame since 1 billion years ago. ESSD.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10297173

Taxon silhouette images (fossil hover tooltips — runtime API)

PhyloPic — phylopic.org

Modifications: Runtime API calls; per-artist attribution and license label shown in the UI