How did Antonio Snider-Pellegrini use fossil plants to argue that continents were once connected?

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Watch Earth's Continents Move — paleogeography Watch a time-lapse of Earth changing through geologic time, from the Cambrian Era to the projected period of Pangea Proxima.

In 1858, French geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini proposed that the presence of identical fossil plants within coal deposits in both North America and Europe served as evidence that these two continents were once physically connected.1

He hypothesized that this former landmass had fragmented, a process he attributed to the biblical Flood, which he suggested occurred to restore the balance of a lopsided Earth. While his specific mechanism for continental movement was not scientifically accurate, his observation regarding the distribution of fossil flora was an early attempt to use paleobotanical evidence to support the concept of continental proximity in the distant past.1