If you have ever wanted to place your backyard on Pangaea, there is now a tool for that.
A team of Earth scientists has released an update to Paleolatitude.org, a web tool that shows the changing latitudes of any location on Earth across 320 million years of continental drift.
The update is based on the Utrecht Paleogeography Model and is designed to help researchers track data through both time and space. That means a fossil can be tied not only to its age, but also to the latitude where it originally formed.
One example comes from a quarry near Winterswijk in the Netherlands, which contains fossils of plants and animals from 245 million years ago. According to the researchers, evidence shows those lifeforms lived in a climate more like the modern Persian Gulf than eastern Europe.
The model confirmed that 245 million years ago, the Winterswijk fossils were located at a latitude similar to modern-day Arabia.
This version adds more detail and new features to the Paleolatitude.org calculator first released about a decade ago.
“With the new model, we have much greater certainty, and our understanding of biodiversity is shifting from one-dimensional, that is, solely over time, to three-dimensional, encompassing space as well,” said co-author Emilia Jarochowska, a paleontologist at Utrecht University.
“This enables us to draw important lessons for the resilience of biodiversity in the present.”
The updated tool includes a global paleogeographic model covering 320 million years, including geographic features now “thrusted over each other in orogenic (mountain) belts”.
It also updates paleomagnetic models with new data, because the poles shifted over time as well as the continents.
The web platform now lets users export data and graphs, and upload their own data for bulk paleolatitude calculations.
To show what the tool can do, the researchers calculated a biodiversity gradient for the late Jurassic using the historic latitudes of landmasses that have since moved.
Using a dataset of about 34,000 Upper Jurassic marine fossils, the team reconstructed the latitudes where those fossils would have been deposited at the time of death.
The researchers said they were able to map which latitudes had the highest diversity at the genus level and apply statistical adjustments, including uncertainty and bootstrapping, to strengthen the result.
“This allows us, for example, to show what happened to global biodiversity during and after mass extinctions in the past, for instance due to the Earth rapidly warming or cooling,” Jarochowska said.
“Which latitudes became uninhabitable first, and which became refuges? Which species migrated, which adapted, and which went extinct?”
The team said it plans to extend the model further back, to 550 million years ago, to include the Cambrian explosion.
The research was published in PLOS One.
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