This Map Shows You What Utica Looked Like During Dinosaur Times

Ever wonder what kind of dinosaurs were stomping around your back yard 150 million years ago?

It can really boggle the mind when you think about how old the Earth really is. We're talking billions and billions of years. When you think about it, humans are such a small blip on the timeline. To put it in another perspective, it's like a nickel of Jeff Bezos's total net worth. So when we're talking about the days of the dinosaurs, which was roughly between 245 and 66 million years ago, you can imagine the Earth looked a little different than it does today.

Ever hear of Pangea? It's what many scientists believed the Earth looked like as one big supercontinent. Then, y'know, volcanos, tsunamis and tectonic shifts of cataclysmic proportions occurred, gradually shaping the Earth into what it looks like today.

This online interactive map lets you see what the Earth looks like during these stages, and you can narrow in on modern cities to see where they would've been during Earth's variou shifts. Take a look at where Utica would be during Pangea. This was around 240 million years ago:

Fast forward 20 million years, to when the first dinosaurs started to pop up, and you can see the Atlantic Ocean starting to creep further into the northeast. (Again, the pinpoint is Utica):

Jump ahead another 100 million years to the Cretaceous Period -- which is when all the "cool dinosaurs" existed, despite what "Jurassic" Park would have you believe -- and you can see Earth looking a little more like it does today, with its multiple continents:

Check out the site here and play around with it for yourself. It's a pretty cool visualization of the kinds of things we've only heard about.