What is The Time Travellers Atlas?
The Time Travellers Atlas is a free interactive web app that lets learners explore dinosaur discoveries by location, time period, size and species. It runs in any browser — desktop, tablet or phone — with nothing to install or sign up for.
Every specimen in the atlas is a real fossil discovery, placed at its actual dig site on a 3D globe. Students can spin the globe, slide through geological time, open detailed species profiles, compare dinosaur sizes side by side, learn palaeontology terms, and test their knowledge through quiz games.
The atlas works across a surprisingly wide age range. Children as young as 4 or 5 can spin the globe, tap fossil markers, compare sizes in Scale Lab and play the quiz games — especially with a parent or teacher alongside them — and they pick up real vocabulary along the way. The written content, species profiles and guided tours are pitched to engage independent readers from about 8 upwards, including adults.
What students can do
Explore the Globe
Spin a 3D globe and tap fossil markers to open species profiles with discovery stories, fossil evidence and habitat details.
Open the Atlas →Travel Through Time
Slide through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous to see which dinosaurs lived when — and how long ago each period really was.
Open the Timeline →Scale Lab
Compare any two dinosaurs side by side — see how their length, weight and time period relate, with a human figure for reference.
Try Scale Lab →Guided Tours
Every specimen has its own narrated tour telling the story of how it was found and what we learned. Nine themed tours link specimens across time and continents.
Start a Tour →Atlas Challenge
Six quiz games covering diet, time periods, fossil locations, species identification, silhouettes and general knowledge.
Play Atlas Challenge →Glossary
42 palaeontology terms explained in plain language — from "holotype" to "theropod" — with pronunciations and tap-to-learn links throughout the app.
Open the Glossary →Not just what we know — how we know it
Most dinosaur material is facts to memorise: names, sizes, diets. This atlas is built around a different question, and it runs through every specimen: how does anyone actually know that?
Nobody has ever seen a living dinosaur. Every number in every profile was worked out from fossils by someone, at some point, and sometimes they got it wrong and had to change their minds. That story is told openly here rather than tidied away:
- Oviraptor was named "egg thief" in 1924 because it was found lying on a nest. Seventy years later a fossilised embryo showed the eggs were its own — it had died protecting them. The name can never be changed.
- Mussaurus means "mouse lizard", because the only fossils found were hatchlings small enough to hold. When adults were finally discovered they weighed over a tonne.
- Iguanodon's thumb spike was reconstructed as a horn on its nose. The Victorian statues built in 1854 still have it in the wrong place.
- Deinocheirus was known from two enormous arms and nothing else for fifty years. Nobody could agree what the rest of it looked like until 2014.
- Psittacosaurus — we know what colour it was, from pigment preserved in its skin.
For teachers this maps directly onto the parts of the curriculum that are hardest to resource: Nature of Science in New Zealand, Working Scientifically in England, Science and Engineering Practices under NGSS, and Science as a Human Endeavour in Australia. Not the facts of science — the practice of it.
Printable worksheets
Eight sheets spanning ages 5–14, each three pages: two for students and one for you, with expected responses, common misconceptions, differentiation and curriculum links. Start with the Teacher’s Guide — it includes a six-lesson sequence and a full curriculum map for New Zealand, England, the United States and Australia.
Free to print, copy and share. No login, no email address, no watermark. All three print cleanly to A4 in black and white, and each comes with a teacher page.
My Dinosaur · ages 5–7
A first research sheet for children still building writing stamina — mostly drawing, ticking and single words. Introduces the idea that everything we know about dinosaurs came out of the ground. 30–40 minutes.
Open the worksheet →Specimen Fact File · ages 8–13
Students research one dinosaur and record what we know — then trace a fact back to the fossil evidence behind it. One blank sheet works for all 54 specimens, so a whole class can research different dinosaurs from the same printout. 45–60 minutes.
Open the worksheet →How Big, Really? · ages 8–12
A measurement and ratio lesson wearing a dinosaur costume. Students pull real lengths and weights from Scale Lab, work out how many of themselves fit end to end, then take a tape measure outside and pace it on the ground. Hidden inside: length order and weight order are not the same. 50–70 minutes.
Open the worksheet →Reading Deep Time · ages 9–14
Students work out from the atlas dates that Stegosaurus is further from T. rex than T. rex is from us, then scale the whole Mesozoic onto a line and find where human history sits on a one-metre rope. Thinner than a pencil mark. 55–70 minutes.
Open the worksheet →What Bones Can't Tell You · ages 9–14
Every dinosaur picture is part fact, part reasoning. Students sort claims into what the fossil shows and what has been inferred, then draw a reconstruction marking in two colours which parts they can defend and which they invented. 50–60 minutes.
Open the worksheet →Naming the Dead · ages 8–13
Greek and Latin roots, taught through names children already want to read. Students predict what unfamiliar names mean before checking — then meet Oviraptor, "egg thief", named in 1924 for a crime it turned out not to have committed. The name was never changed. 45–60 minutes.
Open the worksheet →A Dinosaur in Antarctica · ages 9–13
Two dinosaurs were found in Antarctica — one of them a plant-eater, on a continent that now has almost no plants. Students use the Deep time globe to drag the land back to where it used to sit, and reach continental drift as the answer to a puzzle rather than a fact to memorise. 45–60 minutes.
Open the worksheet →Science Changes Its Mind · ages 11–14
Two dinosaurs that were misunderstood for decades, and the evidence that corrected the record. Asks whether the original conclusions were actually unreasonable at the time — the harder and more useful question. 50–60 minutes.
Open the worksheet →Every sheet includes a teacher page with running notes, differentiation and curriculum links for New Zealand, England, the United States and Australia. If there's something specific your class would use, email me — I'd rather build what teachers actually need than guess.
Classroom activity ideas
- Continent hunt: Pick a continent and list every dinosaur found there. What patterns do students notice about diet, size or time period?
- Scale Lab challenge: Choose two dinosaurs and compare them in Scale Lab. Write a paragraph explaining which was larger, when each lived, and whether they could ever have met.
- Timeline detective: Use the timeline to explore the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. Which periods had the most species? Which had the fewest? Why might that be?
- Tour and discuss: Play a guided tour as a class read-along. Pause after each segment and ask: what surprised you? What questions does this raise?
- Quiz tournament: Split the class into teams and run through Atlas Challenge games together. Track scores across rounds.
- Glossary scavenger hunt: Give students a list of five glossary terms and ask them to find each one used in a real species profile.
- New Zealand connection: Find the New Zealand dinosaur in the atlas. Discuss why New Zealand's dinosaur fossil record is so sparse compared to places like Montana or Patagonia.
- How do we know? Pick any specimen and take its guided tour. Write down one fact from its profile, then explain what fossil evidence that fact came from. Which facts turned out to be hardest to trace?
- Science changes its mind: Compare the Oviraptor and Mussaurus tours. In both cases scientists named an animal based on evidence that later turned out to be misleading. What changed? Why couldn't the names be corrected?
- Deep-link sharing: Each dinosaur has a shareable URL. Ask students to pick their favourite specimen and share the link with a written explanation of why they chose it.
Dinosaurs of New Zealand
The atlas includes a New Zealand theropod discovered by Joan Wiffen in the Mangahouanga Stream, Hawke's Bay, in 1975 — the first evidence that dinosaurs lived in New Zealand. The guided tour for this specimen tells Wiffen's story and explains why New Zealand's dinosaur fossil record is so different from those of larger continents.
This makes a natural starting point for New Zealand classrooms, but the story travels further than that. Wiffen had no university degree and no formal training — she taught herself palaeontology from library books and went looking in a streambed that experts had no reason to visit. The scientific establishment was sceptical; some suggested her bone had washed over from Australia. She kept going, and over the following decades found fossils from at least six kinds of dinosaur, rewriting the country's prehistoric record.
She is the clearest answer in the whole atlas to the question who gets to do science?
Sources and standards
Where the atlas makes a claim, it says where the claim comes from. Four things are worth knowing if you are using this with a class:
- The period colours are the real ones. The timeline, the period markers and the rock-layer colours follow the International Chronostratigraphic Chart published by the International Commission on Stratigraphy — the standard used on geological maps worldwide. They have been lightened slightly to stay legible on a dark screen, but the hues are the standard ones. Put a geological map or textbook chart next to the atlas and the colours will agree. That is a small thing students can check for themselves.
- The continents are a published plate model, not an artist's impression. Deep time uses the GPlates Web Service (EarthByte Group, University of Sydney), processed into two-million-year steps. Plate data © EarthByte, licensed CC BY 3.0.
- Every photograph is credited. Author, licence and source appear directly beneath each image. Casts and replicas are labelled as casts rather than presented as original specimens.
- Where the evidence is missing, the space is left empty. If no correctly identified, freely licensed photograph of a species exists, the atlas shows nothing rather than a photograph of a different animal. Species data comes from published palaeontological literature.
None of this is hidden in the small print — it is all in the About panel inside the app, so a student who asks "how do you know?" can follow the trail themselves.
Good to know
The atlas works in any modern browser. No app download is needed. It performs well on school Chromebooks, iPads and phones. There is no data collection, no login requirement, and no advertising.
All fossil photographs are credited with licence information. Species data is sourced from published palaeontological literature. The project is independent and supported by voluntary donations.
Try it now
Open the atlas and explore — it takes about 30 seconds to see why students love it.
Open The Time Travellers AtlasGet in touch
If you're using the atlas in your classroom, have feedback, or want to discuss how it could work for your students, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
Email timetravellersatlas@gmail.com, find us on Instagram or Pinterest, or support the project on Ko-fi.