Original supercontinent

Usage examples of pangaea.

Earth, unfamiliar at first, until Pangaea splits into Laurasia and Gondwanaland, then these into smaller plates, some of them recognizably rough outlines of the modern continents.

Or it may be that tectonic forces were still roiling the early crust, and an early protocontinental craton, like Pangaea on Earth, had risen in the southern hemisphere and then hardened into place, as the smaller planet cooled faster than Earth, without any subsequent tectonic-plate breakup and drift.

Or it may be that tectonic forces were still roiling the early crust, and an early proto-continental craton, like Pangaea on Earth, had risen in the southern hemisphere and then hardened into place, as the smaller planet cooled faster than Earth, without any subsequent tectonic plate break-up and drift.

Although textbooks give confident-looking representations of ancient landmasses with names like Laurasia, Gondwana, Rodinia, and Pangaea, these are sometimes based on conclusions that don’t altogether hold up.

Now the Earth was composed of only two units: a single enormous continent, called Pangaea, that stretched virtually from pole to pole with Africa at its center, and a single ocean, called Panthalassa, that covered the rest of the globe.

Pangaea teemed and Panthalassa was even more diverse, supporting an amazing array of fish, shellfish, corals, and marine reptiles.