Edna P. Plumstead

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Edna P. Plumstead
Born	(1903-09-15)15 September 1903 Cape Town, Cape Colony
Died	23 September 1989(1989-09-23) (aged 86) Johannesburg
Alma mater	Witwatersrand University
Scientific career
Institutions	Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research, University of the Witwatersrand
Author abbrev. (botany)	Plumst.

Edna Pauline Plumstead (née Janisch; 15 September 1903 Cape Town – 23 September 1989 Johannesburg) was a South African palaeobotanist, of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she graduated in 1924. Edna lived in Cape Town the first seven years of her life and that is where she would explore and find wild flowers in the Cape Peninsula. Plumstead would later on connect the wild flowers to the same one in places like Australia and South America when she would later on defend the continental drift. 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 paleobotany and geology'.^[1] Plumstead was awarded the Chrestian Mica Gondwanaland Medal by the Geological Society of India, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa.^[2]

Edna Plumstead graduated in 1924 from the Witwatersrand University with a B.Sc. (Hons.) 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 Medal. 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. These species were dated from the late Palaeozoic onwards.

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.