…Roamed it.
"The Bitter Southerner delves frequently into the history of the South, but our explorations reach back no more than three centuries. Today, we dig far deeper — into the South of 90 million years ago, when Appalachia was not a mountain range, but a continent. And we tell you some fantastic stories — speculations, yes, but based on real paleontology — about the beasts that roamed our lost continent
It lies under Georgia's forests and Tennessee's mountains, beneath the coves of North Carolina and compacted layers of Alabama stone, beyond battlefields and farms, beyond mines, beyond roads walked by European settlers and diasporic Africans and the first nations of the Native Americans. Our lives drape over it, but its story is seldom told.
Ninety million years ago, in the high Cretaceous — the last great epoch of the dinosaurs — a combination of sinking plates, volcanic activity and rising waters split the American continent down the middle. The warm Niobraran Sea sea rolled in a 620-mile-wide trough across what is now the Great Plains and lower Southeast. Where once there had been a single continent, now there were two. To the west rose Laramidia, a landscape of proud mountain slopes stretching from southern Mexico to western Alaska; to the east, the continent of Appalachia, covering everything from the Canadian Maritimes to the Alabama fall line. Only at the end of the Cretaceous — about 66 million years ago — did the Niobrara retreat and the continents rejoin…"
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