How much danger would you be in, if you lived in Dino Era?

Inspiration

With a project prompt relating to dinosaurs, we had to think of creative prompts which would catch one's eye. While researching for datasets relating to dinosaurs online, we were interested in the geographical location where the fossils of these dinosaurs were found. To add a twist onto this, we decided to make a data visualization project which displays where dinosaur lived 200 million years ago.

What it does

Our data visualizations including geological heats maps, bar graphs, and pie charts speak many words. We are able what periods these dinosaurs lived in and find trends of where these dinosaurs lived. Relating to our prompt, we decided to determine the chance of one's survivability based off the geological locations of where dinosaur fossils were found.

How we built it

Using python and important libraries like pandas, numpy, and seaborn, we initially cleaned our data to include relevant information like species name, latitude and longitude, period lived in, and US state the dinosaur was found in. With our cleaned dataset, we created a GeoJSON file using the data we found and imported this file into MapBox to create an interactive global map with specific points where the dinosaurs were found.

Challenges we ran into

With little previous experience of hackathons in general and geological technologies, learning how to work on MapBox HTML was challenging and took up most of our time. We opted to create a heatmap to display population density, however, was challenged with how to get started. As a solution, we took short crash courses on MapBox's website and also used resources like Google and YouTube.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Along the way, we knew that we were going to create cool data visualizations but we did not know where to start nor what type of visualizations we wanted. We are proud of the fact that we were able to create a global map of the location of these dinosaurs as well as our creative question.

What we learned

Of course, we learned technological skills relating to HTML, python, and other technologies. We also learned soft skills that taught us to work under pressure and long periods of time.

What's next for How much danger would you be in, if you lived in Dino Era?

With the technological skills we learned, we can apply these to making maps relating to real world problems including crime, traffic, and population density. We will continue to use these skills for the rest of our careers.