Used with permission of Maiken Naylor, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/sel/exhibits/stamps
Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), a German geologist and arctic explorer, advanced a theory of continental drift where the lighter continents are floating on denser underlying material in the earth's crust. What was supposedly a single landmass, the supercontinent Pangaea, 200 million years ago broke up into our present continents, which then drifted apart, as shown on the Berlin stamp on the right. Wegener noticed how the the shapes of Brazil and Africa fit together. The existence of a landbridge in the past would account for the paleontological similarities discovered between the two continents. Wegener disappeared on his fiftieth birthday while on an meteorological expedition in Greenland.