Glossopteris flora

Glossopteris was a tree with tongue-shaped leaves, deciduous like many trees of cool climates, that dominated the southern supercontinent Gondwana from about 298 million years ago, after the Late Paleozoic Ice Age retreated. The group of seed plants it belonged to, the glossopterids, grew in the cool, wet lowlands and formed the coal measures of South Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica. Most were large shrubs or small trees, and some may have reached about 30 metres.¹²

The same distinctive leaves occur in South America, Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica, which are now separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean. Eduard Suess noticed the pattern in the 1880s, Alfred Wegener used it in 1912 to argue for continental drift, and Alexander du Toit developed the case. It is hard to see how a seed-bearing tree could have crossed such wide oceans. In February 1912 the polar party of Robert Falcon Scott collected Glossopteris fossils from Mount Buckley on the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica, and kept hauling them on the march back. The group declined sharply around the Great Dying about 252 million years ago and died out by the end of the Triassic.¹²³