Continental drift is the theory, now universally accepted, that the continents have moved, or drifted, across the face of the Earth throughout its history, and that they continue to do so. This theory also explains which continents were at which locations and when, with consequences for both global climate and the evolution of life.

Geographers, and even students of geography, have long noticed that the coastlines of Africa and South America have corresponding shapes, as if they were once a single continent that broke apart. This was suggested as long ago as 1858 by the French geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini. In the 19th century, scientists discovered that the coal deposits of India, South America, Australia, and South Africa all contained a relatively uniform set of fossil plants, which is unlikely to have evolved separately on each continent. The plants are referred to as the Glossopteris flora because it was dominated by the now-extinct seed fern Glossopteris. The Glossopteris flora is also found in Antarctica. Twenty of the 27 species of land plants in the Glossopteris flora of Antarctica can also be found in India!

Evidence such as this led scientists to propose that the continents had been connected in the past. In 1908 American geologist Frank B. Taylor proposed that continents had split and drifted apart, suggesting that these movements not only explained the shapes of the continents but also explained the mid-oceanic ridges. Most scientists preferred the claim that land bridges had connected the continents. Animals and plants had migrated across the land bridges. Geographer Eduard Suess proposed that land bridges had connected India, South America, Australia, and South Africa into a complex he called Gondwanaland. Other land bridges connected the northern continents. Then these land bridges conveniently sank into the ocean, without leaving a trace. While such land bridges seem highly imaginative today, there was at the time no reasonable alternative, except for Taylor's wandering continents. But sometimes even the proposal of land bridges did not help; there is a trilobite fossil species found on only one coast of Newfoundland as well as across the Atlantic in Europe. Trilobites could not have used land bridges to achieve such a strange distribution pattern. . .

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