New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is.

After many decades of often thankless effort — desert fieldwork in rusting 4×4s and sediment coring on the heaving seas; endless grant writing and rejection letters; hours spent cataloging specimens and writing monographs now yellowing in forgotten university file cabinets; ages in the lab fussing over gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers; and, more recently, Red Bull–powered late nights coding in R or coaxing deep convolutional neural networks and advanced climate models — we can now see our planet’s climate history with more clarity and insight than ever before.

What it adds up to is the biography of Earth in the age of animal life.