Dinosaurs: Long dead but still on the move

Jonathan Muth

Hi, I’m Jonathan. At Datawrapper, I am responsible for the technical development of the website, blog, and Academy. In this week’s article, I’ll retrace the journeys of some famous dinosaur fossils.

Although no human saw the meteorite that caused dinosaurs to go extinct, we all owe it a great deal; if the dinosaurs were still around, humanity as we know probably wouldn’t exist. So after a Weekly Chart celebrating meteorites, I thought it would only be fair to our scaled (or quite possibly feathered!) predecessors if I tried this week to map the traces they’ve left on earth as well.

My first idea was to create a map showing where the bones of famous dinosaurs were found. I picked everyone’s favorites — Tyrannosaurus, Ceratops, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Ankylosaurus. But while I was putting the dig sites on a map, another thought crossed my mind: This isn’t where these dinos actually died.

The world looked very different millions of years ago. Due to continental drift, the remains of the dinosaurs have traveled thousands of kilometers even while firmly embedded in rock. The bones of Sue, for example, the most complete T-Rex specimen ever found, traveled 2072 kilometers over the course of 67 million years! Her remains moved in a relatively straight line, from the latitude and longitude of today’s Northern Quebec to South Dakota where she was found.

I found the dig sites via the Paleobiology Database, a treasure trove full of occurrence and taxonomic data for organisms of all geological ages, including dinosaurs. Then looking for a way to find their original locations, I discovered GPlates — a tool used by geologists for “reconstructions of geological and paleogeographic features through geological time.” With its help, plus the right historical model and a few lines of Python code, I was able to calculate not only the coordinates of each dinosaur’s original resting place, but also the path travelled by their remains over time, based on the movement of the tectonic plate the dino was on when it died.

The results are fascinating. The remains of Europasaurus, a tiny relative of the massive Brachiosaurus, had been on a 155 million-year zigzag journey across Europe before being dug up in central Germany in 1998. That means it was moving about 50% slower than Sue on average.

Since the time of the dinosaurs, the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates have been continuously drifting apart — so as Sue goes west, the bones of the first Velociraptor ever found in 1923 have been traveling east.

It’s important to keep in mind that a map of the world would have looked very different when the dinosaurs were still alive. Sue didn’t die on the soil of today’s Northern Quebec, then come back from the dead and walk across half of North America. It’s the ground around her that moved from one latitude and longitude to another. Also, all of these calculations are based on tectonic models that are constantly evolving and improving — using a different model will yield different results.

Thanks for reading! I am no geo- or paleontologist — if anything about the maps seems off, please let me know. I hope that the next time you find yourself in a natural history museum, you’ll look at the dino skeletons with different eyes.

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Jonathan Muth

(he/him) is Datawrapper’s website development lead. He has experience as a brand strategy consultant, product owner and front-end developer, holds a master’s degree in communication science, and toured Europe making music with a GameBoy. Jonathan lives in Berlin.

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