Reading the map

DinoDig plots fossil occurrences from the Paleobiology Database. The map answers "where was this fossil found?" — not "where did this animal live?". The two questions are often related but they are never the same.

Where found vs. where lived

Each pin marks a place where paleontologists collected a specimen. That location reflects where the rock outcrops today, which is shaped by 100+ million years of plate tectonics, erosion, and chance preservation.

An animal's actual range was almost always larger than the dots you see, and often quite different in shape. Treat the map as a record of human discovery, not as a habitat map.

What the uncertainty halo means

Some occurrences are pinned to a precise GPS coordinate. Others are only known to a country or a broad region — for those, the pin sits at the centroid of the known area and a soft halo shows the uncertainty.

A larger halo does not mean the fossil is less important. It means the location data we have is coarser. Use the precision tier on the site card to gauge how literally to read a single point.

Time filter and palette

The era → period → epoch picker filters the map to occurrences whose age range overlaps your selection. Period colors follow the International Commission on Stratigraphy palette and are validated against deuteranopia and protanopia simulation so they remain distinguishable.

If you cannot rely on color, the period name is always shown alongside the swatch.

Keyboard and list-mode access

The map is fully reachable without a pointer. Tab into it for keyboard panning and zoom; press the keyboard-help button for the full shortcut list. For point-by-point selection — the canonical screen-reader path — open the list view and Tab through the table.

How to read a site card

The site card lists the species found at a single occurrence, the formation it sits in, the geological period, and the country. Links from the card lead to the species pages and the formation / region / period hubs when one is available.