The TerraMar Collection

Words before pictures

The collection is described, not shown, on purpose. A tooth is a tooth until you know that three inches is near the ceiling for its kind. The registry answers what a thing was before it asks you to look at anything, because imagination creates ownership and a picture only confirms it. Every visual decision in this colophon serves that idea. It is why the mark is abstract, why there are no specimen photographs, and why the type and color work so hard: the words carry the weight, and the design gets out of their way.

Two scales, one truth

A dual-scale timeline runs the top of the page. "Real time" gives every year equal width, so four hundred million years of animals collapses against the right edge into a single mark, which is what deep time actually looks like. "Stretched" divides by ten at each step so the recent past can be told apart. Nothing else changes between them. Color choice: the era bands are drawn in the reconstruction palette so the timeline and the worlds agree, and the human mark at the very end is the lone stroke of gold, because the gold is us and we are where it arrives.

Where the Earth gave them up

An interactive globe of modern coastlines, drawn from the Natural Earth dataset, with a marker at every documented find-site, pinned from each specimen's own verified locality. It has two states: where the objects were found, and where you can go to see them. Color choice: this is the single place on the site color runs at full strength, water in taxonomy blue #2C5F94 and land in green #5DA36A, because it is the one true, present-day map. Markers carry the category colors so a glance reads the kind of thing at each site.

The worlds they lived in

Eleven hand-drawn paleogeographic reconstructions, each placing the collection's objects on the Earth of their moment. Color choice: these use the reconstruction palette, never the modern one, so the sea reads green then blue and the land bare then living, and the viewer is looking at the actual color of that age, not a stylized guess. A note on each says what is known and what is schematic, because positions before about 540 million years ago are not reliably known. These same eleven worlds are what Orbit wraps around its sphere. Pangaea and the Ediacaran were each drawn before there was anything from them in the collection; a world may stand on the planet ahead of its first object, and joins the registry when that object's record is written.

How the archive teaches

Every specimen opens to a full record, headed by a darker bar that holds where it lived on one side and the ways out, to the globe, Orbit, Scale or a link, on the other: what the object is, where it came from, the animal, its connections, and how its age is known. "What is not here" lists the deliberate absences with state tags, Now, Waiting, Never, Closed. A glossary defines the language and auto-links the first use of each term. Named, not held does the same for the animals and plants the records mention but the collection cannot hold: protected, public, too rare, not here yet, or gone within recorded history. Each entry says why it is not on a shelf and measures how far in time it stood from the objects that are. An animal is named there only when something in the collection gives it a reason to be. Two kinds of link in the running text, told apart by line: a dotted underline opens a definition in the glossary; a dashed one opens an animal in Named, not held. Each says which it is when you hover, and each goes to one place only. Trails walk a visitor through several records in order, with a gold guide bar inside each record saying why it is on the path and where the path goes next. Gold, because a trail is the visitor’s own way through. Category chips, food-web links in blue, and the gold pronunciations run through all of it. The record is the point; every visual system on the page exists to set the stage for it.

Eleven Earths on one sphere

The eleven reconstructions become sphere textures as time passes, sea and land shifting through the reconstruction palette. Where the plates are known, the continents do not fade from one map to the next: the land travels. Everywhere else one image dissolves into the next and nothing is cut, and the first crust cools in patches, never along a line. Each world turns to face the objects that lived in it.

Semantic zoom to the surface

At 1x and 2x you see the original globe. Past 2x the camera descends toward the surface, north-facing with zero roll, and generates ground beneath itself from the globe's own sea and land mask plus procedural relief, rivers, coasts, and per-world biomes. The zero-roll descent is achieved by blending the look-target directly, not by rotating the camera, so the horizon never tilts.

Real events, honestly labeled

The changes overhead are real ones: the Moon starts close and drifts out, the young Sun is fainter and warmer and sweeps its path, the stars slide so no constellation lasts, rock falls constantly in the early years, and the Chicxulub asteroid strikes at 66 million years with ejecta, fire, and dust. A lunar eclipse, a swelling meteor shower, a comet with a Sun-directed tail, and a small alien visitor appear in their moments. Notices name their own category, dated, evidence-based, illustrative, or not science, so the viewer always knows what they are looking at. The asteroid and its sound are locked and are not to be changed.

Standing on the Moon, the sky is the real one: 5,044 stars, every one the naked eye can reach, from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue by way of d3-celestial, with the constellation figures, the five naked-eye planets placed from their orbits, the Sun and the Milky Way on the true plane of the galaxy, all carried inside the page. A map of the whole sky turns you to anything in it.

Your own ground, in every world

Pick a place on today's Earth, by tapping the planet or with your location, and a gold pin rides the continents through every world back to the Ediacaran, saying whether that ground was ocean, shallow sea, ice or dry land, and which continent it belonged to. The place is turned back with the same plate model the worlds are drawn after, reduced to the eleven worlds and carried inside the page as 55 KB of data, so nothing is fetched and the coordinates never leave the browser. While time moves, the camera travels round the planet with the pin, a couple of seconds behind it, the stars turning with it, so the ground stays in view without the planet ever being turned back. Names: every world names its continents and seas with the names geologists use for that age, from Laurentia and the Iapetus Ocean to Pangaea, Panthalassa, Laramidia and Appalachia, each over the land it is part of today, carried on the same plate rotations as the pin. Credit: plate reconstruction after the PALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlates (C. R. Scotese, 2016), licensed CC BY 4.0, reduced to the eleven worlds of this page.

Four beds, and a bar that stays out of the way

An opt-in soundscape, synthesized entirely in code, offers four procedural beds, space, deep ocean, forest, and river, behind a volume slider, and starts muted. Color choice: the top bar is deliberately quiet, resting in slate and hovering to bone rather than gold, so the accent stays off Orbit's chrome and the planet leads. Gold appears only on the specimen pins. Every pinned object rises into the hand as a hologram of its own drawing, the same drawing Scale uses. The object leads; where a film exists it waits one tap beneath, served from this domain and fetched only on play, and the object is always one tap back.

The line says how the thing is known

Every drawn line carries its own certainty, classified from the record's own words. This is the honesty principle turned into a visual system: you can see, in the linework alone, how much of what you are looking at is fact.

One emission, an intensity ladder

Color choice: bone-white linework, with blue arriving only as light hints that fade in and out, never a wash, and the site's gold crossing faintly now and then. The treatment is one emission for every specimen, never tinted by category, because here the animal is the subject and category color would only confuse it. How inferred a thing is sets how strongly it glows: the living animal glows most, the reconstructed head less, the real object least. Scanlines are slow, soft, and warped so they bend through the body; a slight double-image drift, rising motes, and a soft projected light pool complete it. The whole hologram floats gently, as a real projection would.

Glowing thing is the animal, gray thing is the ruler

The measuring references, the 5 foot 7 person, the school bus, the US quarter, are flat slate-gray diagrams, not projections. No body tone, no bloom, no particles. Color choice: this single decision, gray for the ruler and glowing bone for the specimen, is what lets the eye sort the two instantly with no label at all. The meshes are illustrative, not anatomical, and the page says so.

A lab, not a world

Scale's sound is a quiet low hum and nothing more, no world beds carried over from Orbit, nothing shrill. The idea is a lab, not a place: the instrument is running, the specimen is under the light. A soft cue plays as a specimen resolves into view. The sound design for the whole site is being refined deliberately rather than tuned by feel.

Where it lived, drawn in motion

Beside every record, on all three pages, sits a small moving mark: in the corner of Scale, at the top of each registry entry, and under the name in Orbit’s hand. The name is the registry’s category, what the thing is. The mark is a different question: where it lived. There are three, and each moves at its own pace so none of them ever feels mechanical.

Why the category and the mark can disagree: the stromatolite is filed as rock and mineral, and its mark is the waves. That is not an error. It is rock now, but it was built in shallow sea by living mats of microbes three billion years ago, so where it lived was water. The same rule gives a shelled ammonite the waves and a dinosaur the volcano: the color says what a thing is, the mark says where it was.

Three ideas the site already had

The projection is not a new style. It is three things already on the site, drawn together. The scan: the line of light moves through the ring the way a scanner passes over an object. The globe: the ring is the planet as Orbit shows it, a sphere seen from space, and the arc inside it turns the way the Earth turns under the camera. The hologram: the color is Scale’s projection language, bone-white line with blue only as light it gives off, never as a fill, so an object shown this way is drawn in the same light as a thing that was reconstructed. The gold stays out of it. Gold on this site means us and what you can touch, and this is neither.

Two states, told apart by pace

In Orbit’s hand the projection has two states, and the speed of the arc tells them apart before the words do. Projecting: a drawing is loading, and the arc turns fast, once every second and a half, because it will be over in a moment. Projected: the object is shown as the projection itself, under its own name, and the arc slows to a full turn every seven seconds and dims, steady rather than busy. The label flickers once every nine seconds, the way a projection catches, so it reads as light rather than print. Where a film exists it waits beneath the object, never in its place.

The same light, drawn by the ruler

On Scale the projection is not a layer laid on the page. It is drawn into the stage itself, frame by frame, in the same SVG as the animal and the ruler, so it sits where a drawing would sit and at the object’s own size. The ring is sized from the longer side of the space it stands in, so a tall, narrow specimen still gets a ring you can see. The line of light swings through it on a slow curve rather than a sweep, which is how the rest of Scale moves: breathing, not scanning. Each of the three stages says what it shows: the animal at life size, where the piece sat in the body, or the specimen itself. The cards along the side carry a still version, so the list reads the same as the stage.

One language on both pages

Before this, an object without a drawing on Scale was a gray box with a file name in it, and in Orbit a shape stood in for the object. The projection is more accurate: the collection knows what it has, and shows each object in the same light whether it is drawn or projected. Because it is the same on both pages, a visitor who meets it once understands it everywhere. And because the pages read the manifest, a drawing added to a record takes the projection’s place on its own, and nothing else changes.