Continental drift theory was unveiled in 1912 and was met with hilarity. Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), who deduced why the continents look like pieces of a puzzle that fit together (because they were), died without the gratification of acceptance. It would only be in the 1960s that multiple lines of evidence were put together and the grand theory of plate tectonics, now accepted as dogma, would emerge.
Now an international team of scientists led by paleontologist Louis Jacobs of the Southern Methodist University is reporting on matching sets of Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints in Brazil and Cameroon. More than 260 footprints show that 120 million years ago, dinosaurs were strolling around both continents – when they were one, or the supercontinent called Gondwana, which split off from the earlier supercontinent Pangaea. The track sites, made in wetlands lakeshores 120 million years ago, are now separated by more than 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles).
Most of the dinosaur fossils were created by three-toed theropod terrestrial dinosaurs, the group that would bring us tiny little predators and the great T-rex types and that would produce the birds we know and love to eat. Other prints the team studied were likely made by ornithischians, the "bird-hipped" dinosaurs that did not produce the birds, and some were probably made by sauropods, the giants with long necks, according to coauthor Diana Vineyard. These sets of tracks the team studied in Brazil and Cameroon are far from t.