A centipede throws light on ancient India-Australia link

Ancient link between India and Australia discovered through genetic analysis of long-legged centipedes, 'Scutigeromorpha', by CCMB scientists.

The humble long-legged, fleet-footed centipedes often mistaken for spiders from the animal group ‘Scutigeromorpha’ has been found to be having an ancient link between India and Australia.

Using specimens from across the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats as well as a global dataset of genetic sequences, the scientists of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) have found that the Indian ‘scutigeromorphs’ had originated in the supercontinent ‘Gondwana’ and continued to evolve within Peninsular India.

Evolutionary biologists have been particularly intrigued by the biodiversity with the species richness of the Ghats mountain chains and wondered about the origin of the organisms found in Peninsular India. The landmass of Peninsular India is extremely old and was part of ‘Gondwana’ (which consisted of present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australia and South America merged together) approximately 200 million years ago. Eventually, ‘Gondwana’ broke into parts and the Indian landmass drifted to its current position.

“This is fascinating, as most of India’s biodiversity has resulted from dispersal events either from Asia or Africa across the last 65 million years. Only a few other burrowing animals have also been found to have Gondwanan lineages,” said senior scientist Jahnavi Joshi, in a press release.

The current Australian biodiversity of ‘Scutigeromorpha’ is also likely to have originated when the Indian ancestor dispersed from India within the last 100 million years. The scientists think that the “scutigeromorphs” took ‘a passage through India’ from Gondwana all the way to Australia.

“Indo-Australian relationships are rare in literature. It is likely because India and Australia were connected more than 130 million years ago — a date older than the origin of many studied taxonomies, and today are separated by thousands of kilometres of land and ocean,” says research scholar Maya Manivannan, also the first author of the research paper which was published in the Journal of Biogeography, added the release.