We often take it for granted that our neighborhood will be where we remember it is at the end of the day. In reality, the very ground under our feet is always shifting, as much as the life on it is changing.
From reports about efforts to bring back extinct species such as the woolly mammoth to a proposal to add Greenland to the U.S., recent news has made us look at our planet in new ways. For example, did you know that the U.S. and Greenland were actually part of the same continent once? Of course, that was a few hundred million years ago.
Anyone who has ever wondered what their neck of the woods looked like when even extinct species like dinosaurs roamed the Earth can get a peek with this map.
According to a 2019 article from Smithsonian Magazine, the Ancient Earth tool behind “is the brainchild of Ian Webster, curator of the world’s largest digital dinosaur database.” It allows you to pick a location on the globe and see what it looked like from 750 million years ago to 20 million years ago and then what it looks like today, using data Webster pulled from the PALEOMAP Project spearheaded by paleogeographer Christopher Scotese.
If you type in Pittsburgh, Pa., and travel back to 750 million years ago, the continent it is part of looks unrecognizable – it looks more like Westeros from A Song of Ice and Fire than our own 50 states. Back then, during the Cryogenian Period, what we know as the U.S. or the Great Lakes didn’t exist yet.
At that time, there was a supercontinent named Rodinia that was in the process of breaking up, according to Britannica. Two long periods of glaciation (when most of the planet was covered with ice) are believed to be caused by volcanic activity related to this continental breakup. If we fast-forward to 600 million years ago, during the Ediacaran Period, saw a rapid retreat of glaciers, increased oxygen and a lot of tectonic activity.
“The Pannotia supercontinent is a major landmass,” during the Ediacaran Period, according to the map. Based on it, there was no ocean between Pittsburgh to what is now modern-day London, U.K. during that time.
That supercontinent was actually centered around what we now know as the South Pole and it began to rift 550 million years ago. It eventually broke into Laurentia, Siberia, Baltica, and Gondwana by the early Cambrian Period. Laurentia was made up of mostly the present-day U.S. and Greenland.
By the Devonian period around 400 million years ago, Laurentia had merged with much of Europe to become the Euramerica landmass. In the Permian Period that landmass merged with Gondwana to become Pangea, another supercontinent. Amphibious tetrapods, reptiles, land plants were on the planet then, as well as fish and invertebrate life that filled the oceans.
Pittsburgh was still part of Pangea when the rise of the dinosaurs took hold during the Triassic period, around 240 million years ago. On the Ancient Earth map, you can see the full outline of what became the U.S. inside that supercontinent. When you hit 200 million years, you can start to see water pop up around the area that is now the East Coast of the U.S. That water further split what is now the U.S. from the rest of Pangea by the Jurassic Period around 150 million years ago, and our continent continued drifting away during the following Cretaceous period.
It looks like the U.S. and Greenland parted ways around 100 million years ago. By the time dinosaurs went extinct around 66 million years ago, our North American continent is pretty recognizable on the map. The map also noted that Grallator, Astrodon, Mosasaurus, Propanoplosaurus and Coelurus fossils have been found closest to Pittsburgh, providing evidence of its past.