Pangaea was the supercontinent that joined most of Earth’s landmasses together.
It assembled during the late Paleozoic Era and began breaking apart during the Mesozoic Era. At its greatest extent, Pangaea brought together nearly all of the planet’s continental crust in a broad landmass surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa.
The German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener proposed the idea of continental drift in 1912. Matching coastlines, related fossils on now-separated continents, and similar rock formations later helped support the concept. Modern plate tectonics explains how the continents moved after Pangaea fragmented.
Gondwana and Laurasia were major landmasses that existed during the breakup of Pangaea or its later stages. Rodinia was a much older proposed supercontinent, so these names refer to different points in Earth’s geological history.