German scientist Alfred Wegener first proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912.
Courtesy Wikipedia

In 1912, German scientist Alfred Wegener noticed that fossils of closely-related plants and animals occurred in widely separated locations. Glossopteris was a prime example – its leaves are known from Australia, Antarctica, Africa, South America, Madagascar and India. There’s no way the heavy seeds could have traveled across thousands of miles of open ocean to colonize new continents. Wegener proposed that these lands must have all been connected at some point in the distant past.

However, Wegener couldn’t explain how something as massive as a continent could possibly move. Over the next several decades, geologists learned more about earthquakes, fault lines and seafloor spreading. By the late 1960s they had accumulated enough evidence to show that the Earth’s crust is broken into about a dozen major sections, or plates. These plates are constantly moving, floating on the Earth’s molten mantle. Over hundreds of millions of years, the slow movement of the plates has joined continents together, split them apart, and moved them from the tropics to the poles and vice-versa, carrying plants, animals and fossils with them.

You can learn more about Alfred Wegener on the University of California Museum of Paleotonology website.

The University of North Dakota has a nice introduction to plate tectonics, including the role Glossopteris played in inspiring Wegener.

Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has a lesson plan on continental drift for middle-school students.

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