As I received a few emails in the last months asking about it, I thought I would write a short update here in the hope people will somehow find it and not email me about it :)

So, first thing first: in October 2023, the Museum für Naturkunde was victim of a cyberattack. As a result, and to prevent further spreading of said attack, all servers, including the one hosting our database as well as the website where users would go to get data from it, were pulled offline. Access to museum computers and the main server resumed in February/March 2024, but smaller servers like ours, being lower priority, were not. One complication arised though: the database, since 2013, is taken care of by me and David Lazarus, alone. We got some help in 2020 to move server from the Museum IT team, but apart from that we've been more or less on our own. Dave retired in 2021, and myself, am unemployed since early 2023. So there is technically nobody anymore at the Museum linked to Neptune. As a result, late last year, we handed over the database to the Marum in Bremen, who, hopefully, will put it back online in the coming months.

So, what do you do in the meantime if you need Neptune's data? Well I'm glad you asked because I went through the trouble in November 2023 to put every single backup files I had of the database on Zenodo. You can thus access not only a dump of the database but also simple csv files containing the bulk of what you could have downloaded on the website (i. e. microfossil occurrences and age models).

Also, I worked with Ádám Kocsis from FAU Erlangen to integrate this backup into his very useful R package chronosphere. Here is how to access Neptune using it, in combination with my package NSBcompanion (which you can find on GitHub), and replicate your experience of using the website and more:

library(chronosphere)
library(NSBcompanion)
nsb <- chronosphere::fetch("neptune") #For the latest version, but you can also time-travel and use past versions of the database
#For instance, get Neogene rads and diatoms from the Indian Sector of the Southern Ocean:
getNeptuneData(nsb, fossil_group=c("R","D"),age_range=c(0,23), lon_range=c(20,120), lat_range=c(-90,-40))
#Or find the ages of various samples on a specific site:
ages <- findAge(nsb, "74_525A",seq(0,700,100))
#And their corresponding paleocoordinates
findPaleocoordinates(nsb,"74_525A",ages$age_ma)