The tool, hosted at Paleolatitude.org, is built on the Utrecht Paleogeography Model, a reconstruction of tectonic plate movements that incorporates, for the first time in a global model, the trajectories of small tectonic plates and so-called lost continents. Those include Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas, and Argoland, geological terranes that have since been subducted into the Earth's mantle but left their signatures in folded mountain rocks across the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia respectively.
Latitude governs the angle of solar radiation and therefore local climate. Earth scientists reconstructing ancient climates from rock records need to know where those rocks were located when they formed, because tectonic plates can travel vast distances over geological timescales. The Netherlands, for instance, contains 245-million-year-old flora and fauna typical of a desert and tropical sea environment. Research from Utrecht six years ago confirmed this was not simply the result of a globally warmer climate but because the region then sat at the same latitude as present-day Arabia.
The new model addresses this kind of question at unprecedented resolution. Van Hinsbergen's team first built relative plate reconstructions by, in effect, unfolding the deformed rock in mountain belts and reassembling the original plate geometries. The second step, placing that reconstructed arrangement at the correct absolute latitude, relies on paleomagnetism.
"The angle formed by the Earth's magnetic field and the Earth's surface changes gradually from the poles towards the equator and is therefore linked to latitude," explained co-author Bram Vaes, a researcher at the CEREGE institute in Aix-en-Provence, France. Ancient rocks containing magnetic minerals locked in the orientation of the geomagnetic field at the moment of their formation, providing a latitude signal that, combined with radiometric age dating, allows scientists to reconstruct where a given plate was at a given time.
The improved resolution of Paleolatitude.org 3.0 substantially expands its usefulness for paleontology and biodiversity research. Mountain belts that formed when plates collided are heavily fossil-bearing, and the tool now allows paleontologists to place those finds at precise paleolatitudes, enabling tracking of species distributions across different climate zones through time.
"This allows us, for example, to show what happened to global biodiversity during and after mass extinctions in the past, for instance due to the Earth rapidly warming or cooling," said co-author Emilia Jarochowska, a paleontologist at Utrecht University. "Which latitudes became uninhabitable first, and which became refuges? Which species migrated, which adapted, and which went extinct?"
Jarochowska noted that while scenarios for the major mass extinctions have existed for some time, they were difficult to test because of uncertainty about the paleogeographic positions of the fossil localities. The new model reduces that uncertainty substantially and, she said, shifts biodiversity research from a purely temporal framing to one that incorporates spatial dimensions as well.
The current model spans the past 320 million years. The team plans to extend it back to approximately 550 million years ago to cover the Cambrian explosion of complex animal life.
The study was published April 29, 2026, in PLOS One.
Research Report: Paleolatitude.org 3.0: a calculator for paleoclimate and paleobiology studies based on a new global paleogeography model
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