Ouagadougou through 1 billion years

Ouagadougou lay at 38° south, the latitude of Melbourne today.

The Cambrian explosion

Ouagadougou lay at 89° south.

Life reaches land

Ouagadougou lay at 66° south.

The first dinosaurs

Ouagadougou lay at 8° south, the latitude of Dili today.

Ouagadougou crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The great extinction

Ouagadougou lay on the equator.

Ouagadougou crosses the equator.

Heading north.

Homo sapiens

Ouagadougou lay at 12° north, its latitude today.

Ouagadougou today.

12° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 53,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 38° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 89° south; 538 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 190 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 70 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 50 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.