[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 10-Oct-2003
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Contact: Kate Stinchcombe
kate.stinchcombe@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Vanished super-ocean or expanding Earth?

Matching geological outlines and hundreds of trans-Pacific disjunctions of identical or closely related, poor-dispersing taxa, both fossil and extant, imply a close, terrestrial connection between the western Americas and East Asia/Australia/New Zealand during the Mesozoic.

This geological and biogeographic evidence is not consistent with the plate tectonic hypothesis of a now-vanished, pre-Pacific super-ocean, Panthalassa.

Instead, it supports a minority view in geology that holds that all oceans were closed and the Earth's radius was smaller pre-Jurassic.

This is discussed in the October issue of Journal of Biogeography, Volume 30, Issue 10

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