Fossil Climate Detectives
How do we know it used to be warmer — or colder — somewhere on Earth?
Your mission: slide through six real rock-clue ages and go clue-hunting — which climate icons show up, where, and how many of each?
Rocks and fossils can be climate clues! A layer of coal used to be a soggy swamp forest. A fossil crocodile could only have lived somewhere warm. Scientists have collected thousands of these climate clues from rocks all over the world — plotted here reconstructed to where the land actually was when each clue formed.
Data: Boucot, Xu & Scotese (2013), grouped into kid-friendly climate types.
A note on honesty: this dataset has no category for coral reefs, so the crocodile icon (which also covers palms and mangroves) is the closest real match to “warm and wet.” Real data is patchy, too — zero clues at some age can just mean nobody’s found and published one yet. There’s also a real “cold” category (ice-age clues like tillites), but it’s such a small handful compared to the rest that we left it off this map rather than risk confusing you — it’s still in the raw data, honest.
What do you notice?
Do the crocodile icons (warm temperate) ever show up surprisingly close to a pole? That’s a real, famous clue — it means that spot used to be much warmer than it is today, either because the climate was warmer, or because the land itself has since drifted toward the pole (or both!).
At 330 Ma, one climate type covers huge stretches of every continent — which one, and why do you think that age got nicknamed the “Coal Age”?
Try it yourself
- Compare two different ages — which climate type grew the most between them, and which shrank?
- This map leaves one real climate type off on purpose — can you guess which, and why, from the note above?
- Compare this mission’s map to Mission 1’s — can you match up a continent’s shape at the same age?