Welcome to the History of Earth site! Here you can find information about how animals have evolved and how the continents have shifted through time. You can click on the names above of any of the time periods to open a web page with information on that period, or click on questions to open a page that can check your understanding. Below, pick an organism to examine in more detail, then see where it lives or lived on the planet and, below that, its placement on a family tree of animals.
Paleobiology Database: A public resource for fossil data – we use it for specimens and for their taxonomy.
paleotree: R package with many functions for phylogenies (evolutionary family trees) that have fossil and living organisms. Developed by Dave Bapst. We use a slightly modified version; it can be installed by typing devtools::install_github(“bomeara/paleotree”, ref=“developmentBranch”) in R.
PhyloPic: Database of images curated by Mike Keesey and donated by many people. The small icons on the tree all come from here.
animation: R package by Yihui Xie to animate from a series of images in R.
Shiny: R package that can create interactive websites. The first version of this site was created using it; we found that some steps took long enough that caching images was a better idea, but this is still used to help create the final layout. htmltools, R Markdown, and knitr are also key R technologies we use.