Eonmap

A public fossil occurrence explorer built on the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) API. Browse hundreds of thousands of fossil records on an interactive map, filter by taxon, geologic period, environment, and location, and explore temporal and geographic distributions for any clade.

Features

• Interactive map — clustered markers, heatmap mode, paleocoordinate toggle, rectangle bounding-box filter, and three basemap options (OSM, Esri Imagery, CartoDB Dark)
• Browse table — paginated table of occurrences with CSV export
• Taxon pages — occurrence count by geologic period, temporal range timeline, geographic distribution map, and classification breakdown
• Occurrence detail — full taxonomy, location, age bar, and mini-map for individual records
• Light/dark theme — system preference detection with manual toggle, no flash on load

Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	Laravel / PHP
Frontend	Livewire, Alpine.js, Tailwind CSS
Maps	Leaflet, leaflet.markercluster, leaflet-draw, leaflet.heat
Tables	Tabulator
Charts	Chart.js, vis-timeline
Data source	Paleobiology Database public API
Local dev	Laravel Sail (Docker)

Local Development

Requires Docker Desktop.

# Install PHP dependencies
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app composer install

# Copy environment file and generate key
cp .env.example .env
./vendor/bin/sail artisan key:generate

# Start containers
./vendor/bin/sail up -d

# Install JS dependencies and build assets
./vendor/bin/sail npm install
./vendor/bin/sail npm run dev

The app is available at http://localhost.

Useful commands

./vendor/bin/sail artisan ...   # Run Artisan commands
./vendor/bin/sail composer ...  # Run Composer
./vendor/bin/sail npm ...       # Run npm

./vendor/bin/sail php ./vendor/bin/pint          # Lint PHP
./vendor/bin/sail php artisan test               # Run test suite

Routes

Web

Route	Description
GET /map	Interactive fossil map
GET /browse	Paginated occurrence browser
GET /occurrences/{id}	Occurrence detail page
GET /taxa	Taxa index
GET /taxa/{name}	Taxon summary page
GET /guide	Usage guide

API

Route	Description
GET /api/occurrences	Filtered occurrence list (JSON)
GET /api/occurrences/{id}	Single occurrence (JSON)
GET /api/export/occurrences	CSV export of current filter

Architecture

Data is fetched from PBDB through an isolated API layer (app/Api/) and cached for one hour. Livewire components handle filtering state server-side; Alpine.js handles map and chart rendering client-side.

Testing

./vendor/bin/sail php artisan test

Tests use an in-memory SQLite database. All PBDB HTTP calls are stubbed — no network access required.

CI

GitHub Actions runs Pint and the test suite on every push. See .github/workflows/ci.yml.