continental drift

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This week in Dino 101 we are learning about plate tectonics.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when I was in 7th grade, one of my classmates did a science project on continental drift.  He presented it to our science class, so I have been familiar with this idea for about 50 years.  (I just found my old friend by googling -- he's now working at MIT..........)

Continental drift is the theory that the outside crust of our planet moves around, over time.  This idea was radical, in the early part of the 20th century, but after copious evidence for plate tectonics was gathered by deep-sea exploration in the 1950s and 1960s, it is accepted now.

Why are we learning about this in dino class?  About 240 million years ago, nearly all of the land was mashed together in one giant continent (leaving the rest of the planet covered in one giant ocean........).  This is about when dinos began to walk the Earth. 

The fact that the same sorts of dino fossils are found in eastern Brasil and in western Africa is one of the reasons that people (especially Albert Wegener) first suspected the existence of continental drift.........

The Age of Dinos lasted until the mass (global) extinction about 66 million years ago.

(It may not be clear at first -- blue is ocean and tan is land in this video.)



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