What is Gondwana?
Gondwana, which used to be called Gondwanaland, is an ancient and very large continent that was composed of much of present-day South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica. It is named after the Gondwana region of northern India, one of the first sites where fossils from the continent were located. Gondwana formed over a long period of time, finally coming into a near-complete form around 500 million years ago, during the early Cambrian period. Gondwana was so large that the only main bodies of land that were not a part of it were North and South China (separate microcontinents at the time), Siberia, Baltica (present-day Europe), and Laurentia (the craton that includes the present-day USA, Canada, and Greenland). Laurentia and Gondwana were separated by the small Iapetus Sea, and more than 90% of the Earth’s land mass was concentrated in the Sourthern Hemisphere. The vast north sea was known as the Panthalassic Sea, meaning “all seas.” During this time, a burst
