Epoch Explorer on Discord

Adding Epoch Explorer to a Discord server requires the Manage Server permission in that server. Once it is in, its commands are available to everyone there.

Add it to a serverno permissions requested

Adding it to your own account instead needs nothing from anybody, and carries the commands into every server, DM and group chat you are in. A server cannot block that, but it can turn off Use External Apps, which makes the replies visible only to you.

Add it to your accountworks in servers and DMs

There is an Epoch Explorer server, which is a different thing from the bot: joining it puts you in one server with the bot already in it, rather than putting the bot in yours. It is somewhere to ask what a result means, say what the site got wrong, and see what is being worked on.

Join the Discordnothing to install

• /explore

  Answers with menus rather than an answer: pick a period, then a place, then a group of animals if you want one. Every pick redraws the same message, so changing your mind about the period costs a click rather than a new command.

• /fossil name: Tyrannosaurus

  One animal in full: picture and credit, ecology, how long it is recorded for, the rock it comes out of, and any museum 3D scan of it.

• /fossil name: stego

  The same card. Nothing is named stego, so it is read as the beginning of a name and answered with Stegosaurus, saying so and listing what else it could have meant.

• /mya year: 67

  Name a date in millions of years and get five animals alive then, each one a link straight to its page on the site.

• /alongside name: Tyrannosaurus

  What has actually been dug out of the same rock. Not its relatives: a garfish, a soft-shelled turtle and a champsosaur, which say far more about the world it lived in.

• /formations period: Late Cretaceous region: North America

  The named rock a period's fossils come out of, richest first.

• /random period: Devonian

  Something from that period you had probably not heard of.

• /study

  A session on one period: an animal, four names, and the full card once you have guessed. Eight of them, then a score. Nothing is written down, so closing the message ends it.

• /quiz

  One picture and four names for the whole channel. The card keeps its own score, and the first answer from each person counts.

• /timeline

  A picture rather than a paragraph: the whole of animal life drawn to scale, with one period picked out of it. Pick from the menu to move along it.

• /extinction

  A menu of the dated turning points, from the Cambrian Explosion to the warming at the start of the Eocene. Pick one for what happened, then press through to what the record holds either side of it.

• /compare

  The subtraction across a boundary, from menus: what is recorded before and not after, what carries through, what is new. Late Cretaceous against Paleocene loses the hadrosaurs and the ceratopsians, and gains the earliest primates.

Periods and regions are picked from a list, so a command cannot ask for a period that does not exist. Taxon names complete as you type, against the Paleobiology Database's own index, and a partial name is read as the beginning of one. That last part is a guess, so it is always labelled as a guess, with the runners-up beside it.

Every card carries buttons for the question it raises but cannot answer: what else was in that rock, what this animal actually was, what was alive a bit earlier, another one at random. Pressing one redraws the same message, so following a thread leaves a single card in the channel rather than a column of them, and anyone in the channel can press them rather than only whoever ran the command.

• It asks for no permissions

  Rests on the applications.commands scope, which is enough to add slash commands and nothing else.

  Stops at replying to the commands people run. It cannot read your messages, see your channels, or post anything nobody asked for.

• It stores nothing about you

  Rests on the interaction itself, which carries the command and its options.

  Stops at answering it. No message, member, server name or command history is written down. The only thing kept between requests is the fossil data itself, cached by period and by taxon, which is identical for everybody and has nothing to do with who asked.

• Every answer carries its sources

  Rests on the licences the underlying databases publish under.

  Stops at nothing — this is a condition of use rather than politeness, so a card in Discord credits exactly what a card on the site credits, image licence and author included. See sources and methods.

Counts are of what has been found and catalogued, which is not the same as what lived. Rock that is easy to reach in countries with a long collecting tradition is heavily over-represented, and a period with more people working on it looks more diverse than one with fewer. A taxon absent from a comparison is absent from those two searches, which is not the same as extinct. The bot says so where it matters, the same way the site does.

See terms.