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Pangea, in early geologic time, a supercontinent that incorporated almost all the landmasses on Earth. Pangea was surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa, and it was fully assembled by the Early Permian Epoch (some 299 million to about 273 million years ago).
They have produced footprints, bones, and other fossils of the organisms that lived here during the transition from the Triassic to the Jurassic, including plants, freshwater invertebrates, crocodile relatives, and early dinosaurs and their cousins.
The distribution of fossils across the continents is one line of evidence pointing to the existence of Pangaea. The geography of the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean was the first evidence suggesting the existence of Pangaea.
This interactive map shows Pangea. As you click the purple buttons, you can see how the continents shift forming Laurasia and Gondwana. Then the continents as we know them today.
Continents and ocean basins are moved and changed in shape as a result of these plate movements. The sequence of maps on this page shows how a large supercontinent known as Pangaea was fragmented into several pieces, each being part of a mobile plate of the lithosphere.
How did scientists “discover” Pangea and other supercontinents of the past? Nowadays, they can study the geologic record and use radioactive dating, seismic surveys, and other technologies to construct maps of how the world looked at various points in Earth’s history.
Today’s map, by Massimo Pietrobon, is a look back to when all land on the planet was arranged into a supercontinent called Pangea. Pietrobon’s map is unique in that it overlays the approximate borders of present day countries to help us understand how Pangea broke apart to form the world that we know today.