Frank Bursley Taylor

Frank Bursley Taylor ( born November 23, 1860 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, † June 12, 1938 ibid ) was a wealthy American amateur geologist and became famous for his 1908 pre- rendered and in 1910 published in a professional journal hypothesis of continental drift, which he still formulated before Alfred Wegener.

Taylor realized that the separation of the continents like South America and Africa took place exactly at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. He also found out that mountains can be caused by collisions of the continents. Taylor explained the movement of the continents with the assumption that the Moon was captured 100 million years ago by the Earth's gravity. He came here on earth so close that the tides forces moved the continents toward the equator. However, this assumption was not very believable, which the acceptance of the theory of continental drift (which was formerly known in America as " Taylor - Wegener's theory " ), difficult.

Wegener praised Taylor (who later became one of the first of Wegener's followers ) in 1929 primarily related to the development of the Atlantic and the separation of Greenland from North America. Wegener but stressed that he had only learned of Taylor's work, as he had already formulated his own theory.