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Plate 28: 'Map of the East Indian Isthmii'. From Willis (1932), Plate 28.

Plate 28: 'Map of the East Indian Isthmii'. From Willis (1932), Plate 28.

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Two papers, 'Gondwana land bridges' by Charles Schuchert and 'Isthmian links' by Bailey Willis, were published together in 1932. They were apparently motivated by Schuchert's desire to defend his paleogeography of fixed continents against the threat of Alfred Wegener's continental mobilism. Schuchert and Willis both held to land-bridge theory but a...

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... gave similar descriptions and folding colored maps for the Africa-India Isthmus (see Figure 7) and the East Indian Isthmuses (see Figure 8). To draw these, he needed to cross deep ocean areas. ...

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... Wegener also took into consideration the similarity of the fossil fauna of the northern continents and certain geological formations. The explanation that palaeontologists used to give to account for these similarities were founded on the theory of land bridges or 'isthmian links' (strips of land that were supposedly above the sea at certain times and that had allowed the passage of a great number of species from one continent to the other) (see Krill 2011). Especially striking was the presence in South America and Africa of Permian-Carboniferous organisms (360-250 millions of years) that had apparently undergone a similar evolution (Cingolani, 2008). ...
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