Soru

In the late nineteenth century, Austrian geologist Eduard Suess posited the existence of a former supercontinent, Gondwanaland, to explain the anomalous distribution of Glossopteris fern fossils across landmasses currently separated by vast oceans—namely South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica. Traditional phytogeographers of the era had overwhelmingly attributed such disjunct distributions to phytosociological transport via improbable long-distance seed dispersal mechanisms or ephemeral transoceanic land bridges that subsequently subsided into ocean basins. Suess, however, asserted that these landmasses were once contiguous fragments of a single continent that later experienced catastrophic structural collapse of intervening sectors. While Suess’s model challenged orthodox dispersalist paradigms, it preserved the prevailing geological assumption that continental blocks remained fixed in their horizontal positions, accounting for ocean basin formation through vertical subsidence rather than lateral drift. Consequently, when Alfred Wegener subsequently advanced the theory of continental drift in 1912, he drew heavily upon Suess’s palaeobotanical datasets regarding Glossopteris, even as he repudiated Suess’s geophysical mechanism of vertical collapse in favor of horizontal displacement.

Based on the passage, which of the following statements regarding nineteenth-century palaeobotanical and geological theories can be inferred? Consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply.