Word: gondwanaland
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About 150 million years ago, during the breakup of a supercontinent that geologists call Gondwanaland,* South America and Africa began to drift apart, creating the Atlantic Ocean. There is convincing evidence for the once controversial theory that the two continents were once joined; geological features and fossil remains on opposite sides of the ocean show a remarkable match, and the shelves, or underwater plateaus, extending from each of the continents into the Atlantic form a near perfect fit, like adjacent pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. One piece of the puzzle, however, seemed to be missing. There was a deep indentation...
...group of long-extinct freshwater amphibians called Labyrinthodonts, which are known to have lived in both Australia and South Africa in the early Triassic period. The discovery thus lent support to those who believe that Antarctica, Australia, South America and India were once a single supercontinent, called "Gondwanaland,"* that broke up and drifted apart. Creatures like the labyrinthodonts, the continental drifters argue, would not have evolved separately on such isolated continents as Antarctica and Australia...
...Earth causes heat to be stored there until the sub-crust melts. The continental masses sink deeper into this dense, viscous pool, which in turn moves sideways, bulging and rifting ocean floors, allowing heat to escape. Then the cycle begins again. Wegener of Germany proposed that two great continents, Gondwanaland in the Southern Hemisphere and Eurasia in the Northern, cracked and sundered, slid like cakes of ice over the hot sub-crustal pool to form the present continents. Evidence: the coastlines of Western Europe and Africa and those of Eastern, North and South America almost fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces...
First Continents, More than 100,000,000 years ago the hideous, ungainly reptiles which were then the lords of life roamed two vast continents, ''Gondwanaland" in the southern hemisphere, "Laurasia" in the northern. A globe-girdling ocean, the "Tethys Deep," divided them. Mighty Gondwanaland shuddered, cracked and sundered. Its fragments drifted to form South America. Africa. Australia, Peninsular India, Madagascar. Mighty Laurasia similarly broke to form North America and Eurasia...
...water. So much alike are these records at corresponding stages, urged Dr. Du Toit, that they must have been deposited in one undivided land. But the geological record of the southern hemisphere as a whole is utterly different from that of the northern-which would show that mighty Gondwanaland and mighty Laurasia were divided by some such mighty barrier as the "Tethys Deep...