Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

The Jurassic Period 208-144 mya                                                                           

The global climate at this time tended to be warm to hot. Australia was still close to the Antarctic Circle and, like the rest of Pangaea, was covered with vegetation consisting mostly of conifers, cycads and ferns. Rift valleys, the forerunners of the fragmentation of Pangaea were forming. The dominant land vertebrates at this time was still dinosaurs.

Australian geological-palaeogeographical setting²

The primary influences on the shifting pattern of environments that occurred throughout the period were global sea level/base level changes, changes in palaeogeographic location, and in the early part of the period the new tectonic regime that became established at that time Bradshaw & Yeung, 1990,1992; McKellar in press). The breakup of Pangaea and in its southern part, Gondwana, controlled these parameters, and also an important factor was the change in the direction of rotation of Pangaea that occurred at about the beginning of the Jurassic.

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Sources & Further reading

1. Mary E. White, 1993, The Nature of Hidden Worlds: Animals and plants in prehistoric Australia and New Zealand, Reed
2. Turner, S., Bean, L.B., Dettmann, M., McKellar, J. L., McLoughlin, S. & Thulborn, 2009; Australian Jurassic sedimentary and fossil successions: current work and future prospects for marine and non-marine correlation, GFF, Vol. 31, (Pt 1-2, June), pp 49-70. Stockholm, ISSN 1103-5897