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What if you could rewind time 150 million years and walk through Europe as it looked during the Jurassic period? You’d be in for a surprise. There’d be no Eiffel Tower or Alps—just scattered islands, shallow seas, and giant reptiles lounging under conifer trees. If you’re imagining something out of Jurassic Park, you’re not far off… except swap the Hollywood setting for a steamy, subtropical archipelago.
To get a visual sense of this lost world, digital artist Carl-August W. created a beautiful reconstruction called “Jurassic Europe”. It’s not just some artistic guesswork—he based the map on real paleogeographic data, including sea levels and tectonic plate positions reconstructed by geologists and paleontologists. The result feels both artistic and believable, like a satellite snapshot from the Mesozoic Era.
So what did Europe actually look like back then?
The short answer is: not much like today. During the Late Jurassic, Europe wasn’t a solid chunk of land. It looked more like a scattered necklace of islands floating in a warm, shallow sea. The Atlantic Ocean was just beginning to open up, and the landmasses we know now—France, Germany, Spain—were still shifting around, slowly drifting to their modern spots. If you showed a present-day European a map of their continent from 150 million years ago, they’d probably just squint and say, “That’s not Europe.”
The climate was hot and humid—think Florida in July, but all year round. CO₂ levels were much higher than today, which meant fewer ice caps and more steamy coastal lowlands. Europe’s forests were full of ferns, cycads, and early conifers. Flowering plants hadn’t shown up yet.
And the animals? They were wild. Literally.
You had enormous sauropods like Brachiosaurus munching on treetops, along with meat-eaters like Allosaurus stalking prey on land. In the skies, early feathered dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx flapped awkwardly from branch to branch. The surrounding seas weren’t empty either—marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were cruising the waters, along with schools of ammonites and other shelled creatures that now live on as fossils in places like the Jurassic Coast in southern England.
What’s cool about Carl-August W.’s map is that it helps you picture all this. Not as a vague theory or a sentence in a textbook, but as a real, almost tangible place. You can almost see where the herds might have grazed, which parts were under water, and where dinosaurs may have left footprints in the mud.
It’s always a little mind-bending to think that the ground we stand on today was once sea, or that places we now consider “landlocked” were once tropical lagoons. But that’s what makes looking at these kinds of reconstructions so fascinating—they remind us how temporary the current shape of the world really is.
