A team led by Emily Judd at the University of Arizona and The Smithsonian used over 150,000 fossil records and advanced climate models to study Earth’s average global surface temperatures over the past 480 million years. Their findings reveal that Earth has been much hotter for most of this period, with humans appearing during one of the coolest times. Notably, current temperature increases are unprecedented in this extensive timeline. The study, published in Science, highlights the importance of understanding historical climate patterns to contextualize present-day climate change.