Three billion years of the Earth's story, in one house. Every object placed in time, and on the map. The line near the bottom, in gold, is us.
That is what these ages look like when every year gets equal width. Everything after the tiger iron collapses against the right-hand edge, and four hundred million years of animals becomes a single mark. "Stretched" divides by ten at each step so the recent past can be told apart. Nothing else changes.
The Megalosaurus lived about 167 million years ago. The big cut ammonite is a perisphinctid, roughly 160. Seven million years apart, which at this scale is almost nothing. And the rock the jaw came out of is dated by ammonites from that same family, because the bones washed off the land into a shallow sea and settled among the shells.
The planet forms at midnight on January 1. The tiger iron forms in early May. The trilobite walks a seafloor on November 20. Megalosaurus dies on December 18, Stan on December 26. Our species appears at 11:25 in the evening on December 31, and everything anyone has ever written down happens in the last thirty-six seconds.
Every object here is older than the human species except one. Smilodon went into the tar around twenty-five thousand years ago, by which time people had been on Earth for more than a quarter of a million. Somebody watched that animal die.
Seven countries on five continents. TerraMar means land and sea, and this is the land part: every place a piece of this collection came out of the ground.
Drag to spin · tap a marker or a name
The continents have not always been where they are. Seven Earths, drawn from our best reconstructions, with the pieces of this collection placed in the world that made them.
Scientific note: these seven Earths are stylized reconstructions, drawn by hand from published paleogeographic research and simplified for clarity. Positions before about 540 million years ago are not reliably known and are shown schematically. These reconstructions reflect the science as of 2026; they are revised when it changes.
Every object in the collection, in accession order. Tap an entry for the full record: what the object is, where it came from, what the animal was, who it knew, and how its age is known. The blue links walk the food web. The colored chips name shared worlds: groups that lived in the same place at the same time. Accession codes read collection, year, sequence: TMC-24-001 is the first piece of 2024. Entries marked cast are documented reproductions, here because the originals cannot be owned at any price.
The words the labels are written in. Not a dictionary, but a way in: each term here is something the registry above actually uses, explained the way a museum wall would explain it.
A collection born from a child's wonder, built to preserve three billion years of Earth's story alongside one family's own.
TerraMar began with my daughter, Nova.
Like many children, she fell in love with dinosaurs. But over time I realized it wasn't simply a childhood fascination. She saw them with a sense of wonder that was impossible to ignore. As her father, I found myself drawn into that same curiosity. One fossil became another, then another, and before long we weren't simply collecting prehistoric objects—we were learning the story of our planet together.
Along the way I discovered something else. My wife shared that same fascination, though I hadn't fully appreciated it when we first met. As a family, we found ourselves spending weekends visiting natural history museums, exploring prehistoric life, and asking bigger questions about where we came from and how our world came to be. Now all three of our daughters also share a similar sense of wonder.
Looking back, that path makes perfect sense.
Long before TerraMar existed, I felt most at home outdoors. I grew up hiking, camping, exploring caves, climbing mountains, rappelling, whitewater rafting, hunting, fishing, and eventually scuba diving. My parents raised my brother and me with a deep appreciation for the natural world, encouraging us to experience it firsthand rather than simply observe it. Photography came much later—not as the beginning of that journey, but as a way to preserve and share the places, wildlife, landscapes, and moments that had already shaped my life. Looking back, TerraMar feels like a natural continuation of that same path. Prehistoric life—dinosaurs, ancient marine reptiles, fossils, minerals, and the deep history of our planet—simply became another way of exploring the world with the same sense of curiosity and wonder that first drew me outdoors as a child.
As the collection grew, I noticed something that surprised me.
Too often, collections become invisible. A fossil is purchased, placed on a shelf, and eventually forgotten. Its story disappears long before the object does.
I wanted something different.
I wanted a place where every specimen could be understood, where every object had a reason for being here, and where my children could one day discover not only what we collected, but why we chose to preserve it.
That idea became TerraMar.
What began as a simple registry slowly evolved into something much larger: a living archive of Earth's history intertwined with our own family's journey. Every entry documents more than an object. It captures a place, a moment in deep time, the evidence behind it, and often the personal story that brought it into our home.
One realization changed the way I looked at the entire collection.
When I arranged everything chronologically, I discovered that our home contained more than three billion years of Earth's history.
Holding that span of time in your hands is difficult to comprehend. It transforms a shelf of fossils into a timeline of life itself.
TerraMar was designed with longevity in mind. It is intentionally simple, built on open web technologies that can be preserved, moved, and maintained for decades to come. My hope is that whether someone opens these pages next year or fifty years from now, they will still be able to explore this collection and understand the stories it preserves.
I don't know what TerraMar will look like in the future.
Perhaps my daughters will add to it.
Perhaps it will remain exactly as it is today.
Either outcome is perfectly fine.
Because TerraMar was never built simply to collect fossils.
It was built to preserve curiosity.
To encourage questions.
To celebrate discovery.
And to remind our family that the greatest stories on Earth began long before we did—and will continue long after us.