Fossils are any preserved evidence of life from a past geological age, such as the organisms embedded in rock.They are the mineralized remains of an animal or plant. In our research we learned that identical fossils have been found on both Australia and Antarctica. This once again supports the scientific theory of continental drift.
A study of the fossil evidence from the different continents that once made up Gondwana shows great similarities that are hard to explain unless the continents were once connected.
An Australian palaeontologist, Frank Debenham, joined Captain Scott’s Terra Nova expedition in the summer of 1911-1912, to Antarctica. He collected rocks that bristled with the remains of armoured fish from a site near Granite Harbour. Thesea fossils were eventually studied in 1914 by British palaeontologist A.C Seward, who recognised two of the plant species as Glossopteris and Vertebraria.
Both these species were already known as common fossils from Australia, India, southern Africa and South America showing the continents were once a whole.
In Tasmania, there are fossils that suggest that temperate rainforest was spread over Australia, South America, Antarctica and New Zealand around 45 million years ago.
Fossils and biochemical evidence can be used to show close similarities between different species.
Similarities in two species that involve the fossil record and biochemical evidence, as well as anatomical and embrological comparison, may reveal features that are homologous (or from shared ancestry) as opposed to analagous features (similar traits that two different species have that did not result from common ancestry).
Homologous structures, which can be inferred from many methods including fossil and biochemical evidence, support the theory of evolution by showing that different species share traits as a result of their common evolutionary ancestors.
Biochemical evidence includes DNA analysis, which can be used to identify which genes are different between organisms.