Wegener's Continental Drift Evidence

In 1912, the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener proposed that the Earth's continents had once been joined in a single landmass and had since drifted apart, drawing on the way the coastlines of South America and Africa appeared to fit together, matching fossil species found on now widely separated continents, and corresponding rock formations and mountain ranges that lined up across ocean basins. Wegener could not identify a physical mechanism capable of moving continents through solid ocean floor, and most geologists of his time rejected the idea for that reason, so continental drift remained a marginal and largely dismissed hypothesis for decades after his 1930 death. The evidence Wegener assembled was vindicated only in the 1960s, when the discovery of seafloor spreading supplied the missing mechanism and continental drift was absorbed into the modern theory of plate tectonics.