Word: pangaea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...treated this German meteorologist as if he were a member of the Flat Earth Society. Convinced that the continents were anchored firmly in place, geologists dismissed as preposterous his theory that the earth's major land masses had once been huddled together in a single supercontinent, which he called Pangaea (Greek for "whole earth"), then began slowly drifting apart. Wegener had plenty of evidence, ranging from the jigsaw-like fit of the continents to the discovery of matching fossils on opposite sides of oceans, but he couldn't give a satisfactory explanation of what caused the global breakup...
...PANGAEA SPLITTING INTO CONTINENTS and the ocean flowing between them has not been the only great divide in history. An even greater rift emerged--one that changed the course of history forever--when JFK Street rammed itself through Harvard Square, creating a divide in the land greater than any resulting from a wide expanse of sea. This split yielded two institutions which, though separated by no more than 30 yards, are truly worlds apart: Nini's Corner and Out of Town News...
...Pangaea splitting into continents and the ocean flowing between them has not been the only great divide in history. An even greater rift emerged--one that changed the course of history forever--when JFK Street rammed itself through Harvard Square, creating a divide in the land greater than any resulting from a wide expanse of sea. This split yielded two institutions which, though separated by no more than 30 yards, are truly worlds apart: Nini's Corner and Out of Town News...
Even more surprising, while both of the newly discovered dinosaurs are unique to Africa, they seem to be related to species found in the Americas. When the dinosaurs began their reign 220 million years ago, all the planet's landmasses made up a single supercontinent known as Pangaea. Because land animals could move and mate at will, dinosaurs from that era look pretty similar all over the world. But by the end of the Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, continental drift had torn Pangaea into a northern and a southern half, Laurasia and Gondwana. At that point, dinosaurs...
...reason, he and many colleagues believe, may have been a mass extinction of many of the planet's species late in the Triassic period. It could have been caused by the impact of a massive asteroid or comet, perhaps, or by dramatic climate changes triggered as Pangaea separated to form distinct continents. As other animals disappeared wholesale, the dinosaurs evolved rapidly to fill vacant ecological niches. Says Sereno: "It's very difficult to argue that the dinosaurs had something the others didn't. Instead of evolving because they were better, maybe they evolved because there was a sudden vacuum...