Perhaps initiated by heat building up underneath the vast continent, Pangaea began to rift, or split apart, around 200 million years ago. Oceans filled the areas between these new sub-continents.

Over the past 2 billion years, Earth's continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 200 to 600 million ... extinction some 252 million years ago, coinciding with the formation ...

The astonishing diversity of mammalian species today stems in part from the continuing breakup of the continents that began some 200 million years ago and sent different landmasses moving apart.

Instead, the move happened in fits and starts, with continents creeping apart at that single-millimeter-per-year rate for 40 million years, and then suddenly speeding up to 20 times that speed ...