Lemuria
is the name of a continent that purportedly existed in the vastness of
the Indian and Pacific Oceans in a time before Atlantis.
Unlike the
legendary Atlantis, however, it is not part of a twenty-five hundred
year old myth but is rather based on a 19th century hypothesis
erroneously advanced by zoologist and biogeographer Philip Sclater in
an article published in The
Quarterly Journal of Science titled “The
Mammals of Madagascar.” Sclater, in order to explain how
related
primates could be found in areas separated by thousands of miles of
ocean, proposed that Madagascar and India were once the opposite sides
of a submerged landmass. He wrote: The anomalies of the Mammal fauna of Madagascar can best be explained by supposing that . . . a large continent occupied parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans . . . that this continent was broken up into islands, of which some have become amalgamated with . . . Africa, some . . . with what is now Asia; and that in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which . . . I should propose the name Lemuria!
His assumption was of course incorrect, but in a time before the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift became an excepted geological fact, sunken continents along with land bridges were often used to explain how similar species and rock formations could be found in widely separated locations. Indeed, many scientists seeking an explanation for the distribution of similar species in both Asia and the Americas quickly jumped on the bandwagon extending the scope and size of the alleged landmass until it filled a large part of the Pacific. [1] [2] [3]