Frances Bacon (1620): while reviewing the first maps of the coastlines of Africa and South America

noted that the outlines of the continents appear as if they could fit together.
Frances Placet (1668) was the first to suggest that the continents were actually fixed together as
suggested by their outlines.

Alfred Wegener
At one timeestimated to be 200 to 300 million years agocontinents were united in one
supercontinent or protocontinent named Pangaea (or Pangea, from the Greek pan, meaning all, and
gaea, meaning world) that first split into two halves.
The two halves of the protocontinent were the northern continent Laurasia and the southern
continent named Gondwanaland or Gondwana. These two pieces were separated by the Tethys
Sea. Laurasia later subdivided into North America, Eurasia (excluding India), and Greenland.
Gondwana is believed to have includedAntarctica, Australia, Africa, South America, and India.
Two scientists, Edward Suess and Alexander Du Toit, named Pangaea, Gondwanaland, and Laurasia.
The jigsaw fit that the continents make with each other can be seen by looking at any world map.
shows the continents of Africa and South America joined together.
Since his ideas challenged scientists in geology, geophysics, zoogeography and paleontology, it
demonstrates the reactions of different communities of scientists. The reactions by the leading
authorities in the different disciplines was so strong and so negative that serious discussion of the
concept stopped. One noted scientist, the geologist Barry Willis, seemed to be speaking for the rest
when he said:
In spite of the criticisms from several different disciplines Wegener was able to keep Continental
Drift part of the discussion until his death. He knew that any argument based simply on the jigsaw
fit of the continents could easily be explained away as a coincidence. To strengthen his case he
drew from the fields of geology, geography, biology and paleontology. Wegener questioned why
coal deposits, commonly associated with tropical climates, would be found near the North Pole and
why the plains of Africa would show evidence of glaciation. Wegener also presented examples
where fossils of exactly the same prehistoric species were distributed where you would expect
them to be if there had been Continental Drift (e.g. one species occurred in western Africa and
South America, and another in Antartica, India and central Africa) [_1_] . The graphic below shows
the striking distribution of fossils on the different continents.
To explain the unusual distribution of fossils in the Southern Hemisphere some scientists proposed
there may once have been a network of land bridges between the different continents. To explain
the existence of fossils of temperate species being found in arctic regions, the existence of warm
water currents was proposed. Modern scientists would look at these explanations as even less
credible than those proposed by Wegener, but they did help to preserve the steady state theory.
Evidence for the movement of continents on tectonic plates is now extensive. Similar plant and
animal fossils are found around different continent shores, suggesting that they were once joined.
The fossils of Mesosaurus, a freshwater reptile rather like a small crocodile, found both
in Brazil and South Africa, are one example; another is the discovery of fossils of the
land reptile Lystrosaurus from rocks of the same age from locations in South America,Africa,
and Antarctica. There is also living evidencethe same animals being found on two continents.
Some earthworm families (e.g.: Ocnerodrilidae, Acanthodrilidae, Octochaetidae) are found in South
America and Africa, for instance.
The complementary arrangement of the facing sides of South America and Africa is obvious, but is
a temporary coincidence. In millions of years, slab pull and ridge-push, and other forces
of tectonophysics will further separate and rotate those two continents. It was this temporary
feature which inspired Wegener to study what he defined as continental drift, although he did not
live to see his hypothesis become generally accepted.
Widespread distribution of Permo-Carboniferous glacial sediments in South America, Africa,
Madagascar, Arabia, India, Antarctica and Australia was one of the major pieces of evidence for the
theory of continental drift. The continuity of glaciers, inferred from oriented glacial striations and
deposits called tillites, suggested the existence of the supercontinent of Gondwana, which became

a central element of the concept of continental drift. Striations indicated glacial flow away from the
equator and toward the poles, in modern coordinates, and supported the idea that the southern
continents had previously been in dramatically different locations, as well as contiguous with each
other.
The geologic time scale is a system of chronologicalmeasurement that relates stratigraphy to time, and is used
by geologists, paleontologists, and other earth scientists to describe the timing and relationships between events that have
occurred throughout Earth's history.