evidence: The team compiled more than 150,000 published data points from five different geochemical archives (or "proxies") for ancient ocean temperature that are preserved in fossilized shells and other types of ancient organic matter. Their colleagues at the University of Bristol generated more than 850 model simulations of what Earth’s climate could have looked like at different periods of the distant past based on continental position and atmospheric composition. The researchers then used data assimilation to combine these two lines of evidence and create the a more accurate curve of how Earth’s temperature has varied over the past 485 million years.