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The NOW database of fossil mammals came to be through a confluence of several initiatives spanning multiple decades. The first public version of NOW database was released in 1996 and the first Advisory Board was established the year after. Originally, NOW stood for Neogene of the Old World but with the gradual expansion of the database the acronym was eventually reassigned to stand for New and Old Worlds. The structure of what would become NOW was originally cloned from the ETE database of the Smithsonian Institution and the first NOW version accessible over the internet was a node of the ETE database. The first standalone, online version of NOW was launched in 2005 and the first formal steering group was established in 2009. During its existence, NOW has been funded, directly or indirectly, by several organizations but fundamentally it has always been an unfunded community effort, dependent on voluntary work by the participants.

NOW (New and Old Worlds) is a global database of fossil mammal occurrences, currently containing around 68,000 locality-species entries. The database spans the last 66 million years, with its primary focus on the last 23 million years. Whereas the database contains records from all continents, the main focus and coverage of the database historically has been on Eurasia. The database includes primarily, but not exclusively, terrestrial mammals. It covers a large part of the currently known mammalian fossil record, focusing on classical and actively researched fossil localities. The database is managed in collaboration with an international advisory board of experts. Rather than a static archive, it emphasizes the continuous integration of new knowledge of the community, data curation, and consistency of scientific interpretations. The database records species occurrences at localities worldwide, as well as ecological characteristics of fossil species, geological contexts of localities and more. The NOW database is primarily used for two purposes: (1) queries about occurrences of particular taxa, their characteristics and properties of localities in the spirit of an encyclopedia; and (2) large scale research and quantitative analyses of evolutionary processes, patterns, reconstructing past environments, as well as interpreting evolutionary contexts. The data are fully open, no logging in or community membership is necessary for using the data for any purpose.

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