Dozens of new invertebrate species have emerged from deposits of 50-million-year-old amber in India, according to researchers reporting their findings in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The international team of scientists plucked more than 100 new species from the ancient tree resin found among shale sediments in the western state of Gujarat. Surprisingly, the finds display an evolutionary relatedness to species found in Asia, Europe, Australia and South America, suggesting species in ancient India mixed with animals in other continents.
This finding contradicts the prevailing notion that the subcontinent's millennia-long isolation resulted in unique faunal communities as the landmass broke off from Gondwana, one of the supercontinents that formed Pangaea, and floated northward on a collision course with Asia. "Much the way that marsupials define the biota of Australia, we expected to find the same thing only with insects in this amber from ...
