3132: Coastline Similarity

Coastline Similarity

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Title text: Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created by a HUMAN, BUT IT WAS PLAGIARIZED BY A BOT. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic depicts a classroom, likely relating to geography, geology or history, in which the teacher (Miss Lenhart) is discussing the similar coastlines of Africa and South America, and the way that modern understanding has revealed the cause. Cueball initially assumes that one coastline plagiarized the other before Miss Lenhart continues by revealing that it was continental drift that explained the similarity.

Continental drift is the widely accepted theory that Earth's continents were once all connected, and have been moving relative to each other due to plate tectonics. One of the clues that actually led to this discovery was that the shapes of the coastlines of South America and Africa that are separated by the Atlantic Ocean are similar. The similarity is much greater for the submerged continental shelves than for the visible coastlines; they're like adjacent pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Plagiarism is the act of claiming credit for another individual's work, usually by duplicating the results. Though not, strictly, criminal in and of itself, it does constitute fraud, which can be punished as a crime. The discovery of plagiarism in an already-renowned body of work is often cause for scandal, and Cueball's reaction to the assumed plagiarism of the African/South American coastlines reflects this. Of course, continents are inanimate objects, and have no concept of plagiarism, let alone know how to perform it.^{[citation needed]}

The title text continues the joke about plagiarism. Additional corroborating evidence of continental drift is that there are similar species of plant and animal fossils on the two sides of the Atlantic, dating to the time when they were connected. Cueball thinks that the progenitors of these species also plagiarized each other, as opposed to the more mundane explanation which is that the progenitors were the same for both. The younger fossils are descendents of some species that existed across the once-connected lands, the older ones are the species that did not yet have the nascent Atlantic Ocean in their lives.

The theory of continental drift was originally proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, based on such fossil evidence and other geological features common to the two continental borders, in addition to the similarities in shoreline shapes. It's significant to the history of science as a general subject, as a proposal that was originally met with strong opposition (not to mention mockery) but eventually became accepted by almost everyone. Modern cranks and crackpots sometimes point to it in support of their own implausible "theories", as though universal rejection of a "theory" by all of the experts somehow proves that it will someday be accepted and its originator proven right all along. In fact, Wegener's original theory did have a serious flaw, in that it lacked a plausible mechanism, though it was otherwise correct. Modern cranks' "theories" generally lack both plausible mechanisms and good analysis of supporting evidence. ("Yes, they laughed at Galileo... but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.")

Transcript

[Miss Lenhart is holding a pointer pointing to a wall map. The map shows South America and Africa, with the east coast of South America and the southwest coast of Africa highlighted in red.]

Miss Lenhart: People had long noticed that South America and Africa had similarly-shaped coastlines.

[A side view of the classroom. Jill and Cueball are sitting at school desks, looking at Miss Lenhart. The wall map is visible behind Miss Lenhart.]

Miss Lenhart: In the 20^th century, geologists finally found the explanation:

[The same scene, with Cueball having his hands on his face.]

Cueball: Plagiaris--

Miss Lenhart: Continental drift.

Cueball: Oh.

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Discussion

Lol what SectorCorruptor (talk) 16:20, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Lol what --DollarStoreBa'al^ConverseMy life choices 17:30, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Lol what Broseph (talk) 18:13, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Lol what Caliban (talk) 18:52, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Lol what 24.54.131.250 19:24, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Lol what 2001:67C:2564:A301:C26:D05F:D5AA:CA02 21:46, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Lol what ^April_fools^update!(talk) 08:16, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

^^^Plagerism at work^^^ These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 02:18, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

npcs raeb 14:29, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

Plagiarism might refer to the designer of one of the coastlinescopying the design of the other one (a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy). 147.234.73.125 22:56, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Given that Randall has made references to the guide and that a main part of the first book is talking to Slatibartfast who designed the Norvegian fjords, and later had to just do Africa, could actually mean that this is what Randall/Cueball is thinking of... Should this be mentioned in the explanation? --Kynde (talk) 08:14, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Can one (even a Planetary Designer) ever self-plagiarise? The same guy got given a different(/additional) part of the replacement Earth and tried his old award-winning design again... I don't think that counts as plagiarism. There are better ways to describe it, so I say it's an inspiration too far.

At least how it turned out... might have progressed through different stages, say Zlarti got to do Africa, then to do South America, and he still had some of the large-scale patterns and molds so just re-used them on the other side of the adjacent continent, etc... but that's a stretch of reverse-engineering the joke to the supposed cause, long since diluted if it was ever part of the original concept. Mention it, if you must, but I don't think it's anything to do with that. 82.132.236.41 17:54, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Other examples of multiple creators/designers of a world. Strata (a parody of Ringworld (and others), where people have terraforming technology and build planets, including a fake fossil record), and The Last Continent (where a creator ads an additional continent to a "finished" world). Both by Terry Pratchett.

The concept of one or more world creators is so common through human history and myth that I think it deserves a mention, but calling out any particular piece of fiction would only be worth while if it is much more clearly relevant. 107.77.205.64 17:04, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm the comic "Coastline similarity" is likely a roof on "Cosine Similarity" which is used in software industry to measure how close two images are. This method is also used to detect plagiarism. 108.76.190.132 (talk) 23:00, 22 August 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

F***ing vandals. Best of luck, I'm gonna bunker down until this blows over. 207.195.86.18 01:47, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

EDIT: To the dumbs*** who apparently doesn't know how curse words are used: referring to "f***ing X" is a way of expressing HATRED towards X, not love.

I mean to play devils advocate you did pick the single most versatile word in the English lexicon. Capable of not only being a noun, a verb and an adjective, but also an adverb and probably more too. How are we to know without cultural context clues? (Signed a coitus looter)

I'm sure the vandals procreated. 70.115.234.146 01:19, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

My dad once had the opposite conversation with his teacher, where he asked if the two continents had ever been connected and his teacher scoffed at him because continental drift wasn't widely-known yet. - 2603:800C:500:18B3:38A0:233D:17B2:D289 16:05, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

Ooh, spotted an error in the strip: the fossils that match up are Triassic, not Cretaceous. (This is actually an underappreciated geological/paleontological thing: the Atlantic Ocean is what ended the Triassic. The Atlantic crust started as a mantle plume that split apart Pangaea, causing the largest volcano in Earth's history... which is what drove the extinction of the rivals of the early dinosaurs.) (Signed, tr0gd0r) -- Tr0gd0r (talk) 18:53, 25 August 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

South America (as it would become) and Africa were still connected in the Early Cretaceous and only fully unzipped from what was Gondwanaland by the Late Cretaceous. It was during the earlier Triassic that the North Atlantic was initially formed and broke up the Laurasian bit, so it would depend on where you're comparing fossils across. Triassic-era similarities could occur almost everywhere, but maybe throughout the Jurassic and then even into the Cretaceous there'd still be enough land-bridging in some parts to maintain populations (and, subsequently, fossils) on 'both sides' of the Atlantic-divide. (Of course, it's a bit more complicated, tectonic jostling being how it was, even assuming we have a full enough picture and aren't still guessing some of the bits, like what actually happened with Tethys, etc.) 82.132.246.176 16:32, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

You're entirely right! I was just (for unrelated reasons, I swear) looking at continental reconstructions in the Jurassic, and was surprised to see that I was wrong — while the volcano starts shoving apart North American & Europe during the Triassic, it takes until the Cretaceous for it to spread south. Fun note: the rift is still spreading — from what I can tell (and I'll welcome any corrections, yay nerd internet!) it wended its way around South Africa, came up into the Indian Ocean, split, and is now snaking into Africa & Turkey. I also understand that this caused the orogeny that changed the climate in Africa ~10 mya that caused humans and chimpanzees to split. (Still haven't figured out how to properly sign, but: Tr0gd0r) -- Tr0gd0r (talk) 21:47, 29 August 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Signing-off is simple. Merely use the "tilde" key, ~, four times. (Three times or five times, for example, invoke subsets of the full identity+timestamp 'signature' that the four tildes do in full. Most of the time, you do want to use four of them, of course.)

If you're having difficulty finding it, it may depend upon your keyboard. For me (UK Windows laptop keyboard, right now), it's Shift and #, near the Enter key, and. For a more standard US keyboard, it's shift and ` (back-apostophe), to the left of the 1 on the top row. British 'Mac' keyboards may have it down to the left (next to the 'Z' key?), but I think US/International Mac-keyboards have it top-left-next-to-1, still. Other national/manufacturer/compactness keyboards might have it somewhere else, but I won't even try to look up them all, not knowing much about any particular localisation/system peculiarities that apply to you.

For an on-screen keyboard, like there is on my Android tablet, the way I have it set up right now is to go two levels into the 'punctuation' layout to find it. (There's also the anomaly, in that, in that the \, backslash is an easy long-press on the 'main alphabetic layout', but to get the /, (forward-)slash, I have to go into the punctuation set. Why? Backslash is the lesser used one of the two... what does it think it is, a Windows/DOS machine?!? ...and they can be reconfigured, of course, but I've yet to find a reconfiguration that (without doing even odder things to it!) defaults both / and ~ to the 'front layout'. Prior Android devices had, but... current version of GBoard was alreadu a lot different from whatever it was the predecessor tablets used... maybe it's just GBoard rather than various other 'own brand' keyboard apps?)

...however, if none of that helps you, there's yet another way! Next time you edit anything, look at the icon-buttons just above the edit-area. In turn, these are easy click-to-add methods of getting your Bold, Italic, Internal Link, External Link, L2 Headline, Embedded File, File Link, NoWiki, Signature and the Horizontal Rule. They insert a 'sample' version of the text (or, if you preselect some text, any container-formatting button just puts that container around what you selected - the signature one isn't one of those, though). It actually places --~~~~, not just ~~~~, but that just means it'll add two hyphens to the beginning (a traditional email/usenet convention to indicate a signature), which isn't a problem. And it'll look, right now as I post this, exactly like... --92.17.62.87 01:46, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Plagerism Research! Jgharston (talk) 22:59, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Due to lack of evidence supporting the theory about the derivative nature of the work, we concluded that this is a rare case of "convergent erosion". Agf (talk) 07:55, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Plus one for the pun on cosine similarity. Especially as vector search can be used to detect plagiarism 2401:D002:A203:DC00:D67:B1A0:ADAE:B5B9 09:22, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

I thought that the reference to plagiarism may have been a nod to how some map makers would add fake towns or islands to their maps to detect unapproved copies of their maps 2001:8004:1140:203A:AA64:C142:5359:F4 20:52, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

That would be Trap streets, and related trap-features. I'm not seeing the easy parallel to the comic but, as a map-fan myself, it's definitely an interesting concept in its own right. 82.132.244.82 21:12, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
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