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Lemuria 〔OED〕 is the name of a hypothetical "lost land" variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept's 19th-century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography; however, the concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern theories of plate tectonics. Although sunken continents do exist – like Zealandia in the Pacific as well as Mauritia and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean – there is no known geological formation under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that corresponds to the hypothetical Lemuria. Though Lemuria is no longer considered a valid scientific hypothesis, it has been adopted by writers involved in the occult, as well as by some Tamil writers in India. Accounts of Lemuria differ, but all share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic, change, such as pole shift. ==Scientific origins== In 1864 the zoologist and biogeographer Philip Sclater wrote an article on "The Mammals of Madagascar" in ''The Quarterly Journal of Science''. Using a classification he referred to as lemurs but which included related primate groups,〔Neild, Ted ''Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet'' pp.Harvard University Press (2 Nov 2007) ISBN 978-0-674-02659-9 pp. 38–39〕 and puzzled by the presence of their fossils in both Madagascar and India but not in Africa or the Middle East, Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India had once been part of a larger continent. 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!〔 Sclater's theory was hardly unusual for his time: "land bridges", real and imagined, fascinated several of Sclater's contemporaries. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, also looking at the relationship between animals in India and Madagascar, had suggested a southern continent about two decades before Sclater, but did not give it a name.〔 Neild, Ted ''Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet'' pp.Harvard University Press (2 Nov 2007) ISBN 978-0-674-02659-9 p.38〕 The acceptance of Darwinism led scientists to seek to trace the diffusion of species from their points of evolutionary origin. Prior to the acceptance of continental drift, biologists frequently postulated submerged land masses in order to account for populations of land-based species now separated by barriers of water. Similarly, geologists tried to account for striking resemblances of rock formations on different continents. The first systematic attempt was made by Melchior Neumayr in his book ''Erdgeschichte'' in 1887. Many hypothetical submerged land bridges and continents were proposed during the 19th century, in order to account for the present distribution of species. After gaining some acceptance within the scientific community, the concept of Lemuria began to appear in the works of other scholars. Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian taxonomist, proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of "missing link" fossil records. According to another source, Haeckel put forward this thesis prior to Sclater (but without using the name "Lemuria").〔L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents, 1954 (First Edition), p. 52〕 Locating the origins of the human species on this lost continent, he claimed the fossil record could not be found because it sunk beneath the sea. Other scientists hypothesized that Lemuria had extended across parts of the Pacific oceans, seeking to explain the distribution of various species across Asia and the Americas. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lemuria (continent)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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