Rodinia was initially defined as a long‐lived supercontinent that assembled all the continental fragments around Laurentia and remained stable from 1000 up to 750 Ma. Nonetheless, recent work has cast doubt on the Rodinia palaeogeography and even on the timing of its assembly and break‐up. The geochronological and palaeomagnetic databases accumulated for South America and Africa in the last decade show that most of these continental fragments were not part of Rodinia. A wide Brasiliano Ocean separated most of the South American and African cratons from the Laurentia − Amazonia − Rio Apa −West Africa margin. This ocean was closed between 940 and 630 Ma along the Pampean–Paraguay–Araguaia–Pharusian mobile belts. Moreover, accretion along the South American and African platforms was a diachronous and long‐lived process that involved several intra‐oceanic and continental magmatic arcs and microcontinents. This evolution started at around 1000 Ma and ended at around 520 Ma with the final assembly of Gondwana.

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Several publications have contributed to improve the stratigraphy of the Paraíba Basin in northeastern Brazil. However, the characterization and distribution of sedimentary units in onshore areas of this basin are still incomplete, despite their significance for reconstructing the tectono-sedimentary evolution of the South American passive margin. This work provides new information to differentiate among lithologically similar strata, otherwise entirely unrelated in time. This approach included morphological, sedimentological and stratigraphic descriptions based on surface and sub-surface data integrated with remote sensing, optically stimulated luminescence dating, U+Th/He dating of weathered goethite, and heavy mineral analysis. Based on this study, it was possible to show that Cretaceous units are constrained to the eastern part of the onshore Paraíba Basin. Except for a few outcrops of carbonatic rocks nearby the modern coastline, deposits of this age are not exposed to the surface in the study area. Instead, the sedimentary cover throughout the basin is constituted by mineralogically and chronologically distinctive deposits, inserted in the Barreiras Formation and mostly in the Post-Barreiras Sediments, of early/middle Miocene and Late Pleistocene-Holocene ages, respectively. The data presented in this work support tectonic deformation as a factor of great relevance to the distribution of the sedimentary units of the Paraíba Basin.