Insect find challenges India-alone theory
Washington, Oct. 26: Discovery of perfectly preserved insects in amber from a lignite mine in Gujarat has challenged the assumption that India was an isolated island continent about 52 million-years-ago.
A team of German, Indian and US scientists have found a trove of insects in a newly-excavated amber deposit from the Vastan lignite mine, 30 km northeast of Surat, in a geological zone called the Cambay Shale.
The arthropods — bees, termites, spiders, and flies — found in the Cambay deposit are not unique as would be expected on an island but rather have close evolutionary relationships with fossils from other continents, said the scientists detailing their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It has long been assumed that India broke away from Africa about 150 million-years-ago and didn’t join up with another landmass — Asia — until about 50 million years ago.
Thus, the scientists were believing that the insects would differ significantly from those found elsewhere in Asia. To their surprise, the organisms in the amber were found to be closely related to other species found in northern Europe, Australia, New Guinea and tropical America.
“The amber shows, similar to an old photo, what life looked like in India just before the collision with the Asian continent,” said coauthor Mr Jes Rust, professor of invertebrate palaeontology at the Bonn University in Germany.
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