It was on Pangea that the dinosaurs appeared around 230 million years ago. The supercontinent appears to have held together till around 175 million years ago when it began to split up due to a sequence of rifts. First, it broke up into two large land masses—the northern continent of Laurasia (which included North America, Europe and Asia) and the southern continent of Gondwana (which included South America, Africa, Australia, India and Antarctica). Incidentally, the name Gondwana is derived from the Gond tribe of central India.
