Plate motions, Gondwana dinosaurs, Noah's Arks, Beached Viking Funeral Ships, ghost ships, and landspans

Abstract

Gondwana landmasses have served as large-scale biogeographic Noah's Arks and Beached Viking Funeral Ships, as defined by McKenna. The latitudinal trajectories of selected Gondwana dinosaur localities were traced through time in order to evaluate their movement through climate zones relative to those in which they originally formed. The dispersal of fauna during the breakup of Gondwana may have been facilitated by the presence of off shelf islands forming landspans (sensu Iturralde-Vinent and MacPhee) in the Equatorial Atlantic Gateway and elsewhere.