Terms of use

No account and no permission needed, for personal or commercial use alike. Automated use is fine within the rate limits, which keep this site from overloading the free public databases behind it.

Please credit Epoch Explorer when you present the site, its output or its likeness commercially. Do not present that output as your own primary research, and check the citations and sources behind anything you publish from it.

If you need bulk data, the Paleobiology Database publishes it directly and will serve you better than this site can.

Fossil occurrence data comes from the Paleobiology Database under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may use it for anything, including commercially, on one condition: you credit it. That condition travels with the data, so it applies to anything you export from here and to anything you publish from that export.

Every file this site produces has that credit written into it, at the top of a CSV and as a field in a GeoJSON. Keep it there. Cite the Paleobiology Database for the data itself: it is the source, and this site is a way of looking at it.

Images are a separate matter and are licensed one at a time. Each is shown with its author and its licence on the card it appears on, and some of those licences are share-alike or forbid commercial use. Nothing here grants you a licence to any image; check the one on the picture you want and go to Wikimedia Commons for the original. Text descriptions come from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA, which requires attribution and requires derivative text to carry the same licence. Every source is listed here.

It is accurate to the best of the underlying data and honest about where that data stops, which is what the Sources page is for. It is not guaranteed to be correct, complete, current, or available. An empty result means nothing has been found and recorded, not that nothing lived there. Do not make a decision that matters on what you read here without checking it against the primary literature.

The site is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind. It may change or stop without notice. It is a personal project, not a service with an obligation behind it.