Millions of years passed. During this period the mud, silt, sand and the encased plant material experienced great pressure and high temperatures. It was compressed and changed into rock, and underwent various chemical changes. The result? Coal seams. This is why coal is referred to as a fossil fuel. It is also a reminder that coal is finite. The carbon atoms harvested from the air as carbon dioxide by these trees during the process of photosynthesis, hundreds of millions of years ago, can also be found in petrol, waxes, plastics, and a host of other products used in everyday life.
South Africa has a huge potential for new fossil discoveries, with vast territories still waiting to be explored, yet very few researchers are studying fossil plants and insects. We are part of a small group of researchers based at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape province who are determined to change this by shedding more light on Glossopteris and fossil plants in general.
This is revealing a depth of knowledge about Permian ecosystems that has not been seen before in South Africa, and is very rare on a global scale. This work is also opening up new scientific fields and opportunities for skills development that the country desperately needs.
Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Wegener himself did not collect the fossils but he called attention to the idea of using these scientific doc uments stating there were fossils of species present in separate continents in order to support his claim. Illustration showing similar rock assemblages across different continents. It has been noted that the coastlines of South America and West Africa seem to match up, however more particularly the terrains of separate continents conform as well.
Examples include: the Appalachian Mountains of eastern North America linked with the Scottish Highlands, the familiar rock strata of the Karroo system of South Africa matched correctly with the Santa Catarina system in Brazil, and the Brazil and Ghana mountain ranges agreeing over the Atlantic Ocean. Another important piece of evidence in the Continental Drift theory is the fossil relevance. There are various examples of fossils found on separate continents and in no other regions.
This indicates that these continents had to be once joined together because the extensive oceans between these land masses act as a type of barrier for fossil transfer.
Four fossil examples include: the Mesosaurus, Cynognathus, Lystrosaurus, and Glossopteris. The Mesosaurus is known to have been a type of reptile, similar to the modern crocodile, which propelled itself through water with its long hind legs and limber tail. It lived during the early Permian period to million years ago and its remains are found solely in South Africa and Eastern South America. Now if the continents were in still their present positions, there is no possibility that the Mesosaurus would have the capability to swim across such a large body of ocean as the Atlantic because it was a coastal animal.
Before the last of this group finally succumbed to extinction at the end of the Triassic Period it had become one of the major features of the flora of Gondwana. The distribution of this plant was among the first evidence for continental drift. Glossopteris fossils provide important evidence for currently accepted distribution of continental plates in the Permian period that ended million years ago. Fossils have been found in regions as distant as Patagonia, India and southern Australia.
In the Permian, these landmasses were joined into a southern supercontinent known as Gondwana.
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