Bamako through 1 billion years

Bamako lay at 44° south.

The Cambrian explosion

Bamako lay at 85° south.

Life reaches land

Bamako lay at 64° south.

The first dinosaurs

Bamako lay at 5° south, the latitude of Victoria today.

Bamako crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The great extinction

Bamako lay at 2° north, the latitude of Ciudad de la Paz today.

Homo sapiens

Bamako lay at 12° north, its latitude today.

Bamako today.

13° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 53,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 44° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 85° south; 540 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 210 million years ago
Distance travelled: 53,000 kilometres; 1 billion years

other places

Positions come from the plate model of Merdith and colleagues (2021), through the GPlates Web Service of the EarthByte Group at the University of Sydney. The globe shows today's coastlines carried back with their plates, not the shorelines of the time, so it does not say whether a place was land or sea. Cities and their coordinates come from Wikidata.