Figuring out exactly where a fossil sat on the globe when it was alive is not simple. Continents drift, ocean basins open and close, and plotting an ancient location means running the find’s modern coordinates and geological age through computationally demanding plate-tectonics models — usually a job for someone with programming experience and specialized software.

A research team at the University of Barcelona’s BIOST3 group has built a free, browser-based tool meant to put that calculation within reach of anyone. Called the Paleocoordinates Calculator, or PACA, the tool lets a user upload a simple spreadsheet listing a site’s present-day coordinates and geological age, then returns its estimated ancient position within seconds.

PACA runs on the R package palaeoverse and connects to the GPlates web service, letting users compare results across five widely used global plate models — PALEOMAP, GOLONKA, MERDITH2021, TorsvikCocks2017, and MATTHEWS2016_pmag_ref. For each location, the tool reports the range of possible ancient latitudes and how far apart the different models’ estimates fall, giving researchers a built-in sense of how much uncertainty surrounds a given reconstruction. Results can be exported for statistical analysis, and an interactive 3D viewer, built with React and Blender, plots the points directly onto palaeogeographic maps.

The team validated the tool against 142 reconstructions spread across the globe, reporting an average spatial error below 17 meters compared with the traditional GPlates workflow and no sign of systematic bias. The researchers — Noa Scholz-Murcia, Alejandro Rodríguez-Mena, Víctor Madarnás-Gómez, and Antonio Monleón-Getino, all in the UB Faculty of Biology’s Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics — developed PACA as part of the Spanish-government-funded CREI project, which studies the Cretaceous resin deposits that produced many amber fossils. Source code and the 3D conversion scripts are posted openly on Zenodo.

Journal: Scientific Reports
Article Title: A user-friendly online tool for paleocoordinate calculation and 3D visualization
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-46309-z
Publication Date: June 15, 2026

Source: EurekAlert