October 2003
Vanished super-ocean or expanding Earth? Matching geological outlines and hundreds of trans-Pacific disjunctions of identical or closely related, poor-dispersing taxa, both fossil and extant, imply a close, terrestrial connection between the western Americas and East Asia/Australia/New Zealand during the Mesozoic.This geological and biogeographic evidence is not consistent with the plate tectonic hypothesis of a now-vanished, pre-Pacific super-ocean, Panthalassa. Instead, it supports a minority view in geology that holds that all oceans were closed and the Earth's radius was smaller pre-Jurassic. This is discussed in the October issue of Journal of Biogeography, Volume 30, Issue 10 | |