The botanistJoseph Dalton Hooker, noting similarities of the floras of Australia, New Zealand, and southern South America in his six-volumeFlora Antarctica, published between 1844 and 1859, proposed that land bridges had once existed between these land masses.[3]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vanished land bridges were an explanation for observed affinities of plants and animals in distant locations. Such scientists asJoseph Dalton Hooker noted puzzling geological, botanical, and zoological similarities between widely separated areas, and proposed land bridges between appropriate land masses that allowed species to spread between land masses.[3][4] In geology, the concept was first proposed byJules Marcou inLettres sur les roches du Jura et leur distribution géographique dans les deux hémisphères ("Letters on the rocks of theJura [Mountains] and their geographic distribution in the two hemispheres"), 1857–1860.[4]
The theory ofcontinental drift provided an alternate explanation that did not require land bridges.[5] However the continental drift theory was not widely accepted until the development ofplate tectonics in the early 1960s, which more completely explained the motion of continents over geological time.[6][7]
The dictionary definition ofland bridge at Wiktionary