This timeline illustrates how the Earth has changed over the past 225 million years. As we can see from the diagram, in the Permian Period, the Earth’s landmass was contained in a single continent called Pangaea. 25 million years later, in the Triassic period, Pangaea had split into two continents; Laurasia, to the north of the equator, and Gondwanaland to the south; separated by the Tethys Sea. This change continued to occur throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, to the present day, where we now have six distinct continents.