Figure 9-12: The Breakup of the Supercontinent Pangaea (a) The shapes of the continents led Alfred Wegener to conclude that more than 200 million (2 × 108) years ago, the continents were merged into a single supercontinent, which he called Pangaea. (b) Pangaea first split into two smaller land masses, Laurasia and Gondwana. (c) Over millions of years, the continents moved to their present-day locations. Among the evidence confirming this picture are nearly identical rock formations 200 million years in age that today are thousands of kilometers apart but would have been side by side on Pangaea.
(Adapted from F. Press, R. Siever, T. Grotzinger, and T. H. Jordan, Understanding Earth, 4th ed., W. H. Freeman, 2004)