Description
Once upon a time, some 300 million years ago, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Antarctica, and the Americas were all part of one enormous supercontinent: Pangaea. The name—a combination of the Greek words pan, for entire, and Gaia, for Mother Earth—was coined by Alfred Wegener, the originator of the scientific theory of continental drift, who first proposed the theory in 1912.–In contrast to the present Earth and its wider distribution of continental mass, Pangaea was C-shaped, with the bulk of its mass stretching between Earth’s northern and southern polar regions. The supercontinent was surrounded, appropriately enough, by a superocean, Panthalassa. Pangaea is only the most recent supercontinent, assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia. There were at least two others: Rodinia, which broke up 750 million years ago, and Columbia/Nuna, which is what Earth looked like two billion years ago.–There was, needless to say, no money produced 300 million years ago—at least, none that we know about. This album contains money from all seven post-Pangaea continents:–North America (El Salvador 5 centavos)-South America (Brazil 10 centavos)-Europe (Estonia 10 senti)-Africa (Uganda 10 shillings)-Asia (India 20 paise)-Oceania (Tonga 2 seniti)-Antarctica ($1 bill)