The goal of the PALEOMAP Project is to illustrate the plate tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years. In the section on Earth history you can select any time period, read about that period, and see the plate distribution during that period. There is also a section on climate history where you can ... Full description.

Windows to the Universe is a user-friendly learning system pertaining to the Earth and Space sciences. The objective of this project is to develop an innovative and engaging web site that spans the Earth and Space sciences and includes a rich array of documents, including images, movies, animations, and data sets that explore the Earth and Space sciences and the historical and cultural ties between ... Full description.

This virtual field trip takes you to Edisto Beach, a beautiful sand beach about 30 miles south of Charleston, South Carolina. This particular beach is a well known site for Pleistocene fossils. The field trip presnts information on beachcombing and demonstrates screening for fossils and shells through a series of pages that delve into the origin of the items found there. Full description.

This field trip takes you to quarries near Sarasota, on the west-central coast of Florida, where one of the world's most spectacular fossil accumulations is exposed. The fossil-rich sediments range in age from 1 to 5 million years and contain the abundant remains of mollusks, whales, birds, corals, barnacles, and sharks. The trip looks at how sediments were deposited and provides information on the ... Full description.

Users are able to search an extensive database of information on the plant fossil record, including descriptions and occurrences of modern genera and fossil species. Searches can be performed in a variety of ways: by Genera, description, taxonomy, occurrences, and by palaeogeographic maps. After locating the specific plant of interest in the database, the occurrences of that plant are then displayed ... Full description.

This collection of paleontology articles was translated from the original Chinese by Will Downs, an expert in Chinese paleontology and geology, and accomplished translator of Mandarin Chinese. They are from a variety of authors and journals, and cover mostly mammalia and micromammalia from the Cenozoic era. The articles are in PDF format for downloading and printing. Full description.

This Why Files article investigates the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named 'Sue' and the controversy surrounding her. Along with the new information Sue has given paleontologists about dinosaurs, this article discusses how fossils are found, excavated, and prepared in museums without ruining the bones. Full description.

This article is a Why Files short piece about coprolites: fossilized animal feces. The article explains how fossilization occurs in feces and why coprolites are useful to scientists. Fossilized feces reveal a great deal about the eating habits of dinosaurs, as well as other extinct animals. Full description.

In this article, The Why Files examines amber as nature's preservative. This fossilized resin has provided scientists with important clues and evidence for ancient life on Earth. The article investigates what amber is, how it preserves, where it is found, and the discoveries about ancient DNA that have been made by using amber fossils. Full description.

This short Why Files piece is about a recent discovery concerning the Tyrannosaurus rex. It presents evidence, based on biomechanics, that suggests that this dinosaur was not a fast runner, as once thought. Full description.