Because of continental drift, the ground beneath your feet has occupied a different position on the Earth over the ages. Paleolatitude is a tool that shows the latitude of every location on earth was since the days of Pangaea. The Utrecht University news release explains why this matters:

Latitude determines the angle of the sun’s rays and thus also the local climate. Earth scientists who reconstruct the climate of the distant past from traces in rocks therefore need to know where those rocks were located at the time. And that is often not the same place as today, because the tectonic plates may have travelled considerable distances. For example, geoscientists from Utrecht are studying 245-million-year-old flora and fauna in Winterswijk (The Netherlands), which lived in an environment very similar to today’s Persian Gulf: desert and tropical sea. Is that because global climate was so much warmer back then? Or was the Netherlands situated at the same latitude as Arabia? Six years ago, they had already demonstrated that the latter was the case.

For example, according to Paleolatitude my location (45°N) has held more or less the same latitude since the Cretaceous, but in the Carboniferous it was south of the equator. PLOS One article. [Tara Calishain]