Pangaea — Greek for "all Earth" — earned its name: around 335 million years ago, at the close of the Carboniferous, the collision of Gondwana and Laurasia merged all major landmasses into a single enormous continent. Geophysics pioneer Alfred Wegener presented this configuration in 1912 as evidence for continental drift; ridiculed for decades, his idea was definitively confirmed when plate tectonics was established in the 1960s.

Pangaea's climate was shaped by the existence of a single landmass. Its interior lay too far from ocean currents to moderate temperature, producing extreme continental conditions: scorching summers, freezing winters, most precipitation confined to the coastline. As a result, vast interior zones were essentially desert or seasonal steppe. Nevertheless, rich vegetation persisted in tropical coastal regions, heirs to the Carboniferous coal forests.

Pangaea's existence transformed biogeography radically. As continents merged, species previously evolving in isolation met on the same landmass, accelerating both speciation and mass extinction. Tetrapod dispersal across formerly separated landmasses took place during this interval. The Permian plant communities of the southern supercontinent — the Glossopteris flora — recovered in sequential distant continents are among the strongest biological proofs of continental drift.

The breakup, beginning around 201 million years ago and accelerating around 175 million years ago, laid the foundations of today's continental configuration. The Atlantic Ocean opened, the Indian Ocean took shape, and evolutionary isolation resumed — making possible the separate evolution of everything from kangaroos to mangroves.