Paleogeography Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Paleogeographic maps show that 100 million years ago a shallow inland sea called the Western Interior Seaway split North America in half, running from the Arctic Ocean all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.
• ✓Scientists use tiny magnetic crystals locked inside ancient rocks to reconstruct where continents sat on the globe millions of years ago, a technique called paleomagnetism that works like a fossil compass.
• ✓Paleogeography helped confirm that dinosaurs like Iguanodon appeared on multiple continents because Europe, North America, and Africa were still partially connected around 125 million years ago.
• ✓The word paleogeography was being used in scientific literature as far back as 1885, making it one of the oldest terms in the entire toolkit of Earth science.
• ✓Paleogeographers discovered that Antarctica was once covered in rainforests around 52 million years ago, complete with warm temperatures and no ice, which completely rewrote what scientists thought about polar climates.