Where Every Dinosaur Was Found on Earth

Where dinosaurs were found: 143 famous dinosaurs, each mapped to the exact spot its dinosaur fossils came out of the ground, from a slate mine in England in 1815 to the Sahara this year.

The camera flies from find to find in the order they were dug up: the Bone Wars quarries of the American West, the Gobi, Tendaguru, Patagonia, Liaoning. Underneath, 7,092 dinosaur find sites from the Paleobiology Database light up in the year they were first published, coloured by the age of their rocks. The heroes are a curated set of 143, not a census, and the background is the database's record, not every fossil ever dug. The USA leads with over 2,000 sites, then China and Canada.

Key moments:
- 1815 — Megalosaurus, England: slate miners dig up the bones of the first dinosaur ever given a scientific name
- 1878 — Bernissart, Belgium: coal miners 322 m underground hit a pit holding at least 38 Iguanodons
- 1888 — Triceratops, Wyoming: a cowboy tries to lasso a giant skull out of a ravine and snaps off a horn
- 1902 — Tyrannosaurus, Montana: Barnum Brown digs the first T. rex out of the Hell Creek badlands
- 1912 — Spinosaurus, Egypt: found in the Bahariya Oasis, destroyed by bombs in Munich in 1944
- 1971 — The Fighting Dinosaurs, Mongolia: a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops buried mid-fight
- 1990 — Sue the T. rex, South Dakota: a flat tyre, a walk, and the most complete T. rex ever dug up
- 1991 — Cryolophosaurus, Antarctica: cut from a frozen mountainside 650 km from the South Pole

Data: Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org); find sites, years and finders checked against 2+ sources per dinosaur.

#dinosaurs #paleontology #fossils #trex #dinosaurfossils #history #maps #dataviz #statsatlas

PHOTO CREDITS
143 photographs from Wikimedia Commons. 12 are public domain or CC0 and need no credit.
The rest are listed below by licence, naming each photographer as those licences require.
Silhouettes from PhyloPic: Conty (vectorized by T. Michael Keesey), CC BY 3.0; Andrew A. Farke, CC BY 3.0.
Map (c) Mapbox, (c) OpenStreetMap.

CC BY-SA 4.0: 3blindMies, ACKnapp, AbstractionBlue, Alexander Vargas, Ansh Saxena, Anushka10patel, ArcaneHalveKnot, BleachedRice, Camille Gévaudan, Carpenter, Kenneth, Chris Woodrich, Etemenanki3, Evolutionnumber9, Fernando Losada Rodríguez, Ghedo, Jaren Wilkey, Jens Lallensack, Jjw, Jonathan Chen, LittleLazyLass, Meridas (Vladimír Socha), N.Cayla, Rjcastillo, Scott A. Hocknull et al., Stephen F. Poropat et al., Tomjerzyk, Zhangzhugang, Zissoudisctrucker, ケラトプスユウタ, 纳瓦拉的亨利

CC BY-SA 3.0: Ballista at English Wikipedia, Ben2, Cancelos, CaptMondo, Christophe Hendrickx, Eduard Solà, Falconaumanni, FunkMonk, Ghedoghedo, H. Zell, Hatem Moushir, Jens Lallensack, Original uploader was Ballista at en.wikipedia, Packa (Czech Wikipedia), derivative work by Hic et nunc, Paul Hermans, ScottRobertAnselmo, Simona.cerrato, Source: Allie_Caulfield Derivative: User:MathKnight, The original uploader was Billlion at English Wikipedia.

CC BY 2.0: Eden, Janine and Jim, Famille Wielosz-Caron, Ignacio A. Cerda and Jaime E. Powell, James St. John, Jim, the Photographer from Springfield PA, United States of America, Kabacchi, SandwichCafe, Shadowgate from Novara, ITALY, Steve Starer from Commack NY, USA, Talisen, UNED Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, shankar s., the paleobear

CC BY 4.0: Benjamin Healley, Museums Victoria, Dr. Matt Wedel, https://svpow.com, Filippo Bertozzo, Fabio Marco Dalla Vecchia, Matteo Fabbri, Genya Masukawa (art), Yoshitsugu Kobayashi et al., IJReid, Jonathan Chen, Marcos A. F. Sales, Cesar L. Schultz, Mike Taylor, Nizar Ibrahim et al., Paul C. Sereno et al., Skye McDavid, Susannah Maidment et al. & Natural History Museum, London

CC BY-SA 2.0: 5of7, Hugh Llewelyn, Matthew Bellemare, Paul Stainthorp from United Kingdom, Pavel Bochkov, Pavel Bochkov from Moscow, Russia, Tim Evanson, ★Kumiko★, ★Kumiko★ from Tokyo, Japan

CC BY 2.5: Ghedo, Sven Sachs, Jahn J. Hornung, User:MatthiasKabel, Victoria M. Arbour, Philip J. Currie, William Irvin Sellers, Lee Margetts, Rodolfo Aníbal Coria, Phillip Lars Manning

CC BY 3.0: FunkMonk, Matt J. Wedel, Matt Wedel

CC BY-SA 2.5 it: Giovanni Dall'Orto

GFDL 1.2: Eva K.

Дата на публикация: 10 октомври, 2026
Категория: Наука и технология
Ключови думи: On was earth Where Every Found dinosaur