Gondwana five. Selected papers and abstracts papers presented at the fith international Gondwana symposium / Гондвана пять. Избранные доклады и тезисы докладов, представленных на пятом международном симпозиуме в Гондване.

Gondwana Five is not a large or pretentious volume because our resources are not large and we are too aware of our limitations to have any pretensions. The editors are very grateful to those many authors who cheerfully and gracefully accepted cuts in their scripts, sometimes outright mutilation, in order to meet space restrictions. We hope that the volume fairly represents the proceedings of the Fifth Gondwana Symposium and that the papers still contain enough information to be useful. 

Every three years since 1967 symposia have been held to discuss problems and advances in Gondwana geology. The first two (Mar del Plata, 1967; Capetown and Johannesburg, 1970) were devoted to reviews of the continental stratigraphy and paleontology. The third (Canberra, 1973) spent some of its time on marine Gondwana sequences, as was to be expected because of the prevalence of marine Permian strata in Australia, and this drew attention to the margin of Gondwana. At the Canberra meeting there was considerable discussion as to the proper limits of Gondwana geology and hence as to what should be the scope of subsequent symposia, and there was evidence of a developing symbiosis between the Gondwana paleontologist-stratigrapher and the continent-assembling geophysicist. The latter is interested in the events of not only the Gondwana period but also the earlier and later periods. The fourth symposium (Calcutta, 1977), as was appropriate to its venue, reverted to the style of the first two, with emphasis on the classical Gondwana sequences. <...>