Education
Edna Plumstead graduated in 1924 from the Witwatersrand University with a Bachelor of Science
Edna Plumstead graduated in 1924 from the Witwatersrand University with a Bachelor of Science
Honours) in geology and took up an appointment with the Geology Department. Her dissertation for her master"s degree was highly regarded by the Geological Society of South Africa leading to her being the first recipient of the Corstorphine Meda She joined the Bernard Price Institute in 1965 from the Geology Department.
At the time she was studying plant fossils collected in Antarctica, and gradually became convinced that sedimentary rocks of the same age in Antarctica, South Africa, South America, India and Australia contained essentially identical plant fossils.
Although this was long before general acceptance of "continental-drift", plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading, some saw the Antarctic fossil plants as compelling evidence for the existence of the former "super-continent", Gondwana. Some five years after the palaeobotanical evidence was announced to the world, James Kitching added the evidence of vertebrate fossils to this debate when he joined the United States Antarctic Research Group on a visit in 1970, and collected vertebrate fossils identical to those he was accustomed to finding in the Karoo.
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She first began defending the theory of continental drift in the 1950s and has been described as one "of South Africa"s foremost scientists in the field of Gondwana paleobotony and geology".