Paragraph 1：Among the enduring legacies of the famous European voyages of discovery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are a collection and scientific description of plants and animals from around the world. These form the nucleus of the great collections in modern museums and have been responsible for a radical revision in the way that we perceive the structure of Earth and the forces that have shaped its surface over time. As the fauna and flora from far-flung lands came to be described and incorporated into the body of knowledge about the world, it was noted that there were some striking similarities among living and extinct organisms of the Southern Hemisphere continents. In the 1840s, the English botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker commented on the remarkable fact that the flora of South America and Oceania (mainly Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the Malay Archipelago) shared seven families of flowering plants and 48 genera that were not to be found elsewhere. Later, similar patterns were observed in other groups of plants and animals, such as liverworts, lichens, mayflies, midges, and various types of vertebrates. How could these similarities be explained in view of the enormous stretches of ocean that separate the Southern Hemisphere continents today. One idea developed during the late nineteenth century was that there existed in the remote geological past a vast Southern Hemisphere continent; in other words, that the modern continents of the Southern Hemisphere were somehow connected long ago, thus explaining the similarities in fauna and flora.The name given to this hypothetical continent was Gondwana.
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