MAJOR EARTH FEATURES 
185 
pressed on so far as the Dwina River in northern Russia; and yet 
on the South American continent every equivalent of the South 
African fauna is lacking. The meager relations which are indi¬ 
cated by the occurrence in South Africa and in Brazil of Progan- 
sauria that had a marine ancestry, point to a loose connection be¬ 
tween both continents over an archipelago and the Antarctica, 
rather than to the existence of a firm, broad land-bridge. 
The separation of the Indo-Madagascar portion of greater 
Gondwanaland from the African block must have followed later 
in Liassic times, since those striking relations between Ethiopian 
and Andean marine faunas, which later reached their maximum 
in the spread of the Early Cretacic Uitenhage fauna from Cutch 
to Malone in western Texas, and which had as a necessary con¬ 
comitant the opening up of the Strait of Mozambique, were initi¬ 
ated as early as the deposition of the Upper Liassic sediments 
of Malvatana. This separation can therefore also explain the 
invasion of the Triassic land vertebrates of Eurasia into anterior 
India by way of Africa, but not the incursion of Megalosaurus 
and Titanosaurus into anterior India and Madagascar. It must 
also have been in the time between the Late Liassic and the Late 
Jurassic times that the Indian continental masses made their 
way from the Strait of Mozambique to a position very near to 
the one they occupy to-day. Then the invasion of anterior India 
and also of Australia by Megalosaurus could no longer have taken 
place over the already opened Strait of Mozambique, but only 
from the northwest over one of the island bridges of Tethys, 
which we conceive of, as did Penck, not as an ocean, but as a 
mediterranean sea swarming with archipelagoes and indented 
with bays, whose single basin could only have been formed 
gradually through small sounds, like the present Hellespont or the 
Bosphorus. 
On the other side, however, Madagascar could not yet have 
been separated from India itself in Late Cretacic times, since on 
this island, also, are found remains of those great land reptiles. 
If we accept a separation of the shores of Madagascar and India 
through a breaking off of the latter, according to Wegener, then 
no invasion of Madagascar by the Cretacic dinosaurs of India 
16 Bearing in mind Handlirsch’s justifiable criticism of the landbridge theory, I shall 
limit myself here to the great land animals, whose passive spread over wide sea-ways 
is impossible. 
