Geologic significance of land organisms that crossed over the Eastern Tethys "Barrier" during the Permo-Triassic

Abstract

During the Permo-Triassic (P-T), some terrestrial organisms had distributions that spanned the eastern Tethys Sea between Gondwanaland and Asia while avoiding a Northwest African-Southwest European connection. These data strongly suggest that a broad paleotethys ocean-barrier did not exist, while transport across it on displaced terranes leads to further difficulties. Earth expansion overcomes these problems by joining eastern Gondwanaland and southern Asia throughout P-T times. The apparent failure of various plate tectonic models in this region stems from their requirement that the earth's diameter has remained constant through time, thus creating an unnecessarily wide Tethys ocean. Instead, if Paleotethys were a shallow epicontinental seabarrier, it would allow some terrestrial organisms to cross at narrow passage ways during regressions. The data also require India to be connected with Asia in P-T times, whereas plate tectonic models have them separated by a wide ocean barrier then and not rejoined until Eocene times.