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In Germany, however, Taylor’s idea was picked up by a theorist named Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist at the University of Marburg. Wegener investigated the many plants and fossils that did not fit comfortably into the standard model of Earth history. Animal fossils repeatedly turned up on opposite sides of oceans that were too wide to swim. How, he wondered, did marsupials travel from South America to Australia? How did snails turn up in Scandinavia and the US?
But in 1938, the Ebro was not so peaceful. Spain was in the middle of a civil war. On one side fought the legal and democratic government of Spain, radical and left wing. On the other, were the rebel generals, conservatives of every kind and Catholic reactionaries, all united in their belief that Spain must never be a secular, liberal democracy.
In 1908 by an
amateur American geologist named Frank Bursley Taylor. He thought – rightly – that
continents moved and their crashing together could have pushed up the world’s
mountains. He noticed that some continents were shaped very similarly to others
so that, for example, South America might have been fitted to Africa like a jigsaw
puzzle, and so on. He did not produce much evidence though and the theory was
considered too crazy for serious attention.