New interactive map homes in on towns 500 million years ago
Scientists have created an online interactive map, revealing where your home town was located before millions of years of continental drift.
California palaeontologist Ian Webster created the new map in a web application, based on geological models created by Christopher Stoese, according to reports from CNN.
You can rotate the globe with your track pad or mouse, to see the way the continents have spread across the globe at different points in time.
The map allows you to virtually travel back in time with use of pre-set time increments.
One such increment is the rough date the first flowers grew or the time of the first vertebrates.
It gives users the ability to search for a city name in a search bar in order to view it upon the map and track its movements through time.
For example, the English capital of London has found itself belonging to unrecognisable ancient continents and moving all over the globe before eventually splitting off as part of the island land mass known as England today
Users can also get guides on which creatures existed on Earth at specific points in history.
For instance, 220 million years ago, in a time period known as the Middle Triassic, the map explains,
“The Earth is recovering from the Permian-Triassic extinction.
“Small dinosaurs begin to appear. Therapsids and archosaurs emerge, along with the first flying vertebrates.” ‘Earth may outlast us all’ Webster told CNN, the map “shows that our environment is dynamic and can change.
“The history of Earth is longer than we can conceive, and the current arrangement of plate tectonics and continents is an accident of time.
The map explains: “Early Triassic, 240m years ago, oxygen levels are significantly lower due to the extinction of many land plants.
“Many corals went extinct, with reefs taking millions of years to re-form.
“Small ancestors to birds, mammals, and dinosaurs survive.
“Late Triassic. An extinction event is about to happen, resulting in the disappearance of 76 per cent of all terrestrial and marine life species.”
Visit https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancientearth#240 site.