From Pangea to Portland

A brief 290 million year history of West Dorset.

Lets take a look at planet Earth when it was one huge singular continent, a land mass called Pangea and see where West Dorset was about 299 million years ago!

Although the earth is approx 4.5 billion years old, for expediency and convenience, I’m going to start pondering the history of ancient Dorset at about 290 million years ago at a time when earth was a single continent called Pangea.

Back then, Dorset, or at least the real estate we now label as Dorset, would have been residing on a slab of rock right over the equator. (A teutonic plate we know today as Eurasia)

Dinosaurs were a thing back then and many of the creatures we uncover in fossil form along our own West Dorset coast are lifeforms that thrived in the shallow seas and red deserts that Dorset (and Devon) now represents and reveals in the geological record.