Bedrock

Bedrock is a field atlas of deep time — a way of reading the ground under your
feet as a page of geological history.

Open the atlas and you are handed a ribbon of the last 541 million years. Drag
it and the page follows: the period changes colour, the age rewrites itself,
and one tap carries you to the outcrops that produced fossils in that slice of
time.

The map works the other way round. Pan to a coastline, a quarry or a motorway
cutting, and pins gather over the ground in the colours the International
Commission on Stratigraphy gives each period, so a crowded shoreline reads as
a stack of eras rather than as a scattering of dots. Tap one and you see what
came out of that spot, how old the bed is, what rock held it, and which paper
described it.

Search a genus and Bedrock answers with a distribution plate: every locality
that carries coordinates, from the first appearance to the last, with the
outcrops listed underneath.

And when you are actually outside, the journal takes over. Photograph the
specimen, name the formation, pin the outcrop. The note stays on your phone;
nothing you write is uploaded anywhere.

The record itself comes live from the Paleobiology Database, a
community-curated archive maintained by palaeontologists and released under
CC BY 4.0. Bedrock adds the reading of it: the period ribbon, the map plates,
and the way a single taxon spreads across time and space.

For anyone who has ever picked up a rock and wondered how old it is.