Dinosaurs proper, including the birds that survived them.
Animals routinely filed next to dinosaurs and just as routinely mislabelled as one.
The line that led to us. The sail-backs are in here, not with the dinosaurs.
Jawed and jawless fish that carry the earliest bone in the record.
Everything with an exoskeleton or no skeleton at all. Most of the fossil record by count.
A reference shelf for prehistoric life. One entry per genus: when it lived, how much it weighed, where it was found, who described it, what is still argued about, and what keeps getting misread.
26 entries on the shelf · 7 periods open · plates drawn from a per-clade shape library
Clade: clear
Early Cambrian seas were almost entirely soft-bodied; the first widely biomineralised skeletons appear here, which is why Cambrian fossils are the oldest that look like bone at all.
The Age of Fishes: armoured placoderms rule the seas while the first forests and the first four-limbed tetrapods appear on land. Ends with the Kellwasser extinction pulses.
Pangaea is at its most complete and its interior is dry. Ends with the end-Permian crisis, the largest extinction in the fossil record.
Recovery after the Permian crisis produces the first dinosaurs, the first pterosaurs and the first true mammals, all three within about 30 million years of each other.
Pangaea breaks apart, shallow seas flood the continents, and sauropods reach their absolute size ceiling. The Solnhofen lagoon preserves feathers in limestone.
Megalosaurus
巨齿龙属
Theropoda
700 kg - 1.0 t
Ichthyosaurus
鱼龙属
Ichthyosauria
1.0 t - 1.5 t
Plesiosaurus
蛇颈龙属
Plesiosauria
400 kg - 700 kg
Allosaurus
异特龙属
Theropoda
1.4 t - 2.5 t
Diplodocus
梁龙属
Sauropodomorpha
10.0 t - 16.0 t
Brachiosaurus
腕龙属
Sauropodomorpha
28.0 t - 56.0 t
Archaeopteryx
始祖鸟属
Theropoda
0 kg - 1 kg
Stegosaurus
剑龙属
Ornithischia
3.0 t - 7.0 t
Flowering plants spread, chalk seas deposit the white limestone that names the period, and the largest terrestrial predators that ever lived appear in the final two million years.
Protoceratops
原角龙属
Ornithischia
80 kg - 180 kg
Therizinosaurus
镰刀龙属
Theropoda
3.0 t - 5.0 t
Iguanodon
禽龙属
Ornithischia
3.0 t - 4.0 t
Deinonychus
恐爪龙属
Theropoda
60 kg - 100 kg
Spinosaurus
棘龙属
Theropoda
6.5 t - 7.5 t
Pteranodon
无齿翼龙属
Pterosauria
20 kg - 25 kg
Mosasaurus
沧龙属
Mosasauridae
5.0 t - 14.0 t
Ankylosaurus
甲龙属
Ornithischia
4.5 t - 8.0 t
Velociraptor
伶盗龙属
Theropoda
14 kg - 20 kg
Triceratops
三角龙属
Ornithischia
6.0 t - 12.0 t
Tyrannosaurus
暴龙属
Theropoda
5.4 t - 8.8 t
Repeated glacial cycles drive the megafauna of the mammoth steppe, and the record ends with an extinction pulse that overlaps the spread of modern humans.
Each entry carries a vector plate assembled from a per-clade library of skull, vertebral and limb shapes, scaled to the animal's published body length and set on a stratigraphic background in its period colour. A drawing can point at the feature that matters for that genus; a photograph usually cannot, and most fossil photography has unclear licensing.
Body mass for an extinct animal is an estimate with a spread. Entries give the low and high end of the range that appears in the literature and name the dimension the estimate is anchored to — femur circumference, humerus length, or a volumetric model of the torso.
Where specialists disagree, the entry says so instead of picking a winner. Every entry also carries a short list of claims that circulate widely and are contradicted by the fossil record, with the evidence that contradicts them.
The shelf fills up on a schedule rather than all at once. Periods with nothing published yet appear in the time band as sealed drawers, greyed out and not clickable, so you can see what is still in preparation.
