A GONDWANAN CONTEXT

Two hundred million years ago, all the world's continents formed one supercontinent, Pangea, the Australian section of which was near the South Pole. Soon after, in the mid-Jurassic, Pangea split into northern (Laurasia) and southern (Gondwana) supercontinents:

Gondwana was a name first used in this sense by the nineteenth century Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, derived from a Sanskrit reference to an ancient Indian people. The name was inspired by the Gond kingdoms, as caretakers of sites in peninsular India (the Narbada Valley) where the first of many fossils typical of the southern continents had been discovered. The Gondwanan rocks range from 350 to 150 million years in age and are replicated in seven major landmasses – India, Africa, Madagascar, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica.… Geologists H. B. Medicott and W.T. Blandford, in their Manual of the Geology of India, noted the abundance of fossils, particularly of ancient seed-ferns (Glossopteris) in Carboniferous-Permian coal measures from peninsular India, and adopted the term Gondwana for the whole series of fossiliferous rocks.… Suess extended the term to the southern supercontinent.

…the split of Pangea … set in train two separate evolutionary pathways for the world's modern biota – northern and southern. The effects of this monumental continental divergence are evident today in the geographical distribution of plants, animals and microorganisms and underpin the second significant shift in scientific conceptual understanding we wish to highlight – the development of a Gondwanan understanding of the biota of southern continents and islands, especially Australia.…