After watching the latest Jurassic World – Fallen Kingdom movie, you may get the impression that those large dinosaurs lived on the planet Earth that looked just like our Earth at the present times. But the Earth of those times was completely different – the continents were joined together providing larger land mass for the dinosaurs to roam around, the weather was also different and of course, most of the species in the animal kingdom were entirely different.
You can have a peek into the past of our planet by using a web app developed by Google engineers called Ancient Earth Globe which is basically how Google Earth would appear hundreds of millions of years ago. As you visit the Ancient Earth Globe, it displays how our planet must have looked like 750 million years ago. The Earth is shown in 3D as a globe and it keeps rotating so that you can have the complete view of the entire planet. You can start or stop the rotation and toggle the clouds from the side menu.
The web app can display the state of this planet at many different critical stages – when first multi-cellular life came into existence, when first insects started crawling around, when reptiles ruled the world, when the dinosaurs became dominant, when the primates started to flourish on this planet and so on. You can select all these stages from the drop-down list and have a look at how the blue planet looked back then.
Even if you are not entirely interested in this pre-historic milestones, you can select the time period from the top drop-down list to see how the planet looked so many millions of years ago. You can choose the time all the way back from 750 million years ago to the present time. Keep in the mind that the total age of this planet is 4500 million years.
Another interesting feature of Ancient Earth Globe is that you can locate your addresses, cities or countries on the planet as it existed millions of years ago. Simply type in your city name in the text box on the top-left and it will pin-point it on the globe – no matter how older version of the globe you are looking at. This will give you an idea of how the Earth has changed due to tectonic movements. You can take a screenshot of your ancient home and send it to your friends to give them a little surprise.
Ancient Earth Globe is very interesting for everyone but the high school students will particularly find it very exciting.
You can visit Ancient Earth Globe at http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/.