India's island past rewritten in amber

摘要

Fifty-million-year-old insects preserved in amber are helping to rewrite the story of India's almighty crash into the Eurasian continent, suggesting that for as long as a few million years before the collision, India was connected to Asia by archipelagos. India spent tens of millions of years as an island before colliding with Asia. Yet the fossil record contains no evidence that unique species evolved on the subcontinent during this time, so India may not have been as isolated as it seemed to be.