Look up about continental vs ocean crust, ocean crust is younger and has a shorter lifetime. You have better chances finding maritime fossils on land.

Yeah subduction is the missing key that took a while for us to understand. Ocean crust is young.

In fact most earthly rock is relatively young.

Plate tectonics was such a clever idea. So obvious now, I mean just look at a map of the world of course continents were once one, you can see where they join, like a jigsaw puzzle.

It astonished early western explorers finding seashells on mountains!

or maybe all the continents were once one because it was just the full surface of an expanding planet