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quickly broke up again as proposed by Wegener. Variations on this theme have continued to appear and were pulled together in 1995 in a review article4 proposing the breakup of a pre-Cambrian supercontinent named Rodinia around 750 million years--exactly coincidental with the time given by the Urantia Papers.
There are other features of the Urantia Papers' story of our planet that are quite remarkable. Remembering the fierce opposition against continental drift that existed during time of receipt and publication of the Papers, their authors nevertheless associated the collision of the continental land mass and the oceanic floor with the formation of "the whole vast north and south mountain range extending from Alaska down through Mexico to Cape Horn." (P. 689) The collision of tectonic plates and subduction of the oceanic plate is now accepted as a major component of the forces involved in mountain building in areas like the west coast of the Americas.
The Papers also tell of features such as land bridges connecting Australia, and the Antarctic continent with South America and South Africa that would have allowed primitive placental (marsupial) animals that flourished 50 million years ago to move between these continents.
The presence of marsupial fossils in Oligocene strata (about 35 to 40 million years old) in Australia and in America in the Cretaceous strata dating as far back as 65 million years ago, together with the recent discovery of marsupial fossils on Seymour Island in Antarctica provide remarkable evidence for statements (P.695) about the ancestors of Australia's kangaroos and the land bridges of 35 to 45 million years ago. Yet when the Papers were written in the 1930's, geologists or paleontologists who supported the notion of continental drift would have been labeled as mavericks. All of which raises the question of why the authors of the Urantia Papers would have written such material except they possessed knowledge unavailable on Urantia.
References
1. K.S. Thorne, (1994) Black Holes and Time Warps. (Picador, London)
2. Encyclopedia Britannica (2000)
3. J. Gribbin, Genesis, (1982)
4. W.D. Dalziel, Earth before Pangea, Scientific American 272 (1) 28. (1995)
5. L..J Mullins and M.J. Sprunger. (2000) A History of the Urantia Papers. (Penumbra Press, Boulder.)
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