plants and insects began populating the land. Other, bigger animals eventually followed, pursuing the pioneers for food.

The Big Crunch finally began about 350 million years ago, sealing up the sliver of water that the Iapetos Ocean had become. The collision was hardly an instantaneous event, however, and the crunch continued for around 100 million years. Continents move slowly, but they move surely; there's a lot of inertia built up in moving a mass the size of a continent and it takes a while to stop its movement, By the time things finally ground to a halt toward the end of the Paleozoic (250 million years ago), all the continents were united into the single supercontinent of Pangaea. Connecticut had become quite a different place than it had been when the collision began. A massive terrane sandwich of Proto-North America, lassies, and Avalonia had formed. The Appalachian Mountains, then a chain of giants 20,000 to 30,000 feet high, rose where an ocean once lay. Connecticut was left much compressed (even a little smaller than it is today). Life was also greatly changed by the passage of another hundred or so million years. Now there were forests, small dinosaurs, and the earliest mammals.

After a few tens of millions of years of hanging around together, one might say the continents decided they had had enough of each other's company. Beginning about 200 million years ago, Pangaea began breaking apart. Eventually, a new ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, cracked the weld between the continents wide open. One of the cracks opened a massive trapdoor into Connecticut's section of the Appalachians, widening the state slightly. The trench filled with brownstone eroded from the adjacent mountains and traprock welled up from the Earth's interior. The more the trapdoor opened, the more the stack of sediments and traprock tipped, until they achieved a rakish tilt.

Following the break-up 200 million years ago, Connecticut's bedrock has been a more passive participant in the region's geologic history. In eastern North America there have been no more continental collisions, no more welding of minicontinents, no more volcanism. North America has slowly drifted away from Europe and Africa, shifting the focus of plate tectonic activity to the West Coast. The East Coast has trailed quietly behind. In a sense, the break-up of Pangaea continues

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