Welcome to our site

The Paleobiology Database seeks to provide researchers and the public with information about the entire fossil record. It has expanded continuously since 2000 thanks to the efforts of 296 paleontologists from around the world.

You can use the site to find out about fossil collections, individual plants and animals, taxonomic groups, references to publications, stratigraphic units, time scales, and time intervals.

Use our data

Tools on the site also let you generate paleomaps, data summary tables, lists of common taxa, first appearances, diversity curves, ecological statistics, time scale confidence intervals, stratigraphic confidence intervals, and (just for fun) paper title stats.

All of our data can be downloaded, including collection, occurrence, or specimen records, taxonomic names and opinions, measurements of specimens, and Neptune occurrences.

Other resources

Students may want to see our paleogeographic animations, virtual globes, and lists of dinosaur facts and figures, or learn about a random species.

Professional researchers are encouraged to join the Database and students may want to apply for the 2012 analytical methods workshop.

More about us

You may want to read our FAQ and our lists of participating researchers, participating institutions, personnel, Online Systematics Archives, and official publications.

We maintain mirror sites at Macquarie University, the Museum für Naturkunde, UCSB, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.