PaleoDex → Features → Continental Drift
Continental Drift
540 million years of tectonic history, animated.
The Continental Drift map lets you scrub from today back to the Cambrian — roughly 540 million years — and watch the continents move in real time. As you move through geological time, the species that lived in each era appear on the map. It's built on GPlates paleogeographic reconstructions, the same model used in academic research.
How it works
The timeline is a continuous scrubber. Move it and the map updates: continental plates shift, oceans open and close, and the featured fauna and flora of each period surface. The map covers all 12 geological periods.
- Cambrian to present. The full 540-million-year span of complex animal life, from the Cambrian Explosion to the present.
- Featured species per era. As you move through time, representative species from that period appear — not invented for the app, but pulled from the actual fossil record.
- Honest uncertainty. Reconstructions older than approximately 200 Ma are labelled as approximate. Continental positions at deep time are estimates based on the best available model, not certainties.
The data source
The paleogeographic reconstructions are powered by GPlates, an open-source paleogeographic model developed by geoscientists and used in academic research. PaleoDex renders it as a live map using MapLibre and MapTiler.
All 12 geological periods
The map covers the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary. Each period has documented species in the Fossil-DEX, cross-linked from the timeline.