This ant , preserve in amber 50 million long time ago , is grounds that we may have dramatically misunderstood the environmental history of India .
Until lately , scientists conceive that many of the flora and creature in the Amerindic subcontinent had develop in closing off from other landmasses , during a menses C of thousands of years ago before India smashed into Asia . That clang created the Himalayas , and also – it was believed – brought India ’s unique set of plants and animals into first contact with those elsewhere in Asia and Europe . Now , however , it see like “ stray ” India in reality contained a number of creatures and trees that existed elsewhere on the globe – let in place like Australia and Mexico . It appears that India was once a tropic wood .
This has in reality deepened the mystery of India ’s early biosphere , because it ’s unclear how the landmass take on such diversity in closing off from other land mass on the satellite .
According to a sum-up of the study , in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences :
The array of unique plant life and animate being species in India are think to have evolve during the continent ’s 100 million year northward journey that ended with the monumental collision that take shape the Himalayas . Jes Rust and colleagues extract more than 300 pounds of amber from 50 million - year - sometime deposit in western India , and identified a distinctive chemical signature that suggested the resin was produced by a globally far-flung family of tropical Tree . The research worker dissolved the amber with solvents and extracted entire preserved specimens of more than 700 ancient insects , arachnids , and crustacean from more than 55 families , as well as abundant works and fungal remains . The louse revealed unexpected geographic connectedness to present-day species from Asia and Australia , and to ancient ancestors detect as far by as Mexico and Central America . The study offer lineal fogey grounds that Indian amber contains an former record of a tropical forest with diverse beast , and that pre - contact India may not have been as biologically isolate as suspected , according to the writer .
understand the full scientific article viaPNAS
Amber - BiologyHistoryPaleontology
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