Hyderabad / New Delhi, Aug 30 (Bureau) For over 200 years, evolutionary biologists have been on a quest to understand the origins of Earth’s biodiversity. The tremendous species richness in Peninsular India, particularly within the Western and Eastern Ghats mountain ranges, has long intrigued scientists. This region is of particular interest due to the ancient nature of the Peninsular Indian landmass, which was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana—comprising present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and South America—around 200 million years ago. As Gondwana broke apart, the Indian landmass drifted to its current position.
This raises the question: where did the organisms found in Peninsular India originate? Dr Jahnavi Joshi’s lab at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, sought to answer this question by studying a group of animals known as Scutigeromorpha. These long-legged, swift centipedes are often mistaken for spiders. By analyzing specimens from across the Western and Eastern Ghats, along with a global dataset of genetic sequences, the researchers discovered that Indian scutigeromorphs originated in Gondwana and continued to evolve within Peninsular India. “This is fascinating, as most of India’s biodiversity has resulted from dispersal events into India from either Asia or Africa over the last 65 million years.
Only a few other burrowing animals have been found to have Gondwanan lineages,” notes Dr Joshi, Senior Scientist at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology. Furthermore, the study suggests that the current biodiversity of Scutigeromorpha in Australia likely originated when the Indian ancestor of these centipedes dispersed from India within the last 100 million years. “Indo-Australian relationships are rare in the literature, likely because India and Australia were connected more than 130 million years ago—a date older than the origin of many studied taxa—and today are separated by thousands of kilometres of land and ocean,” says Maya Manivannan, the first author of the paper. “Perhaps, the scutigeromorphs took ‘a passage through India’ from Gondwana to Australia,” she added.