Life on the Moving Map: 540 Million Years of Animal Fossils on the Drifting Continents, from the Paleobiology Database and the PALEOMAP Plate Model

Every fossil has two locations: where it is found today and where the animal lived, which plate tectonics has since moved. I place 409,895 fossil occurrences of 24 animal groups, from trilobites to hominids, from the Paleobiology Database at their ancient positions, computed with the PALEOMAP plate model, and draw them on PALEOMAP continental outlines for 66 ages from 540 million years ago to today. I describe the assembly and break-up of Pangaea with a simple index, the share of all land in the largest connected land mass, which exceeds 85% from 270 to 180 million years ago and peaks at 90.2% at 180 million years ago (today 54.4%). Counting distinct genera in 5 million year bins, trilobites make up 57% of Paleozoic genera in these groups, insects 42% of Mesozoic and mammals 39% of Cenozoic genera. Dinosaur genera from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic, when Pangaea was whole, are found on more than one present-day continent more than twice as often (11.3%) as Cretaceous genera (5.1%). A simple last-appearance measure picks out the end-Permian (74.4% of genera last seen) and end-Cretaceous extinctions but not the end-Triassic. Throughout, the record is strongly shaped by where palaeontologists work: 66% of occurrences come from North America and Europe, which hold 32% of the land. An interactive map lets readers move through time, switch any fossil between its ancient and present-day position, and search for genera. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/deep-time-life/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/deep-time-life. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/deep-time-life/. Text, figures and derived data: CC BY 4.0; code: MIT. Fossil data: The Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org), data accessed 2026, CC BY 4.0. Continental outlines and palaeo-coordinates: PALEOMAP (C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project) via the GPlates Web Service (EarthByte group, University of Sydney); PALEOMAP's own reuse terms could not be verified and are credited in full. Present-day places: Natural Earth (public domain).