Pangaea and Continental Drift

More than 400 years ago, Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish scholar and geographer, suggested that the continents were somehow fragments of an earlier landmass, or supercontinent. In fact, when the first accurate maps of the Americas were made, other cartographers noticed the similarities of the coastlines of South America and Africa. Though this notion that the two landmasses were pieces of an ancient larger continent was discussed, few took the idea seriously until the turn of the last century.

The idea of moving continents was presented as a full-blown scientific theory by German geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912. He proposed that all of the modern continents are fragments of a supercontinent called Pangaea. This supercontinent began to split during the Mesozoic time period about 225 million years ago. In the intervening time, the modern continents drifted to their current positions. This idea became known as continental drift.


Source: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/historical.html (public domain)