Hyderabad: Scientists link origins of Indian centipedes to ancient supercontinent Gondwana

The scientists used specimens from across the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats as well as a global dataset of genetic sequences. The tremendous species richness of the peninsular region of India, particularly within the Western and Eastern Ghats mountain chains have intrigued the researchers.

Hyderabad: Scientists at Hyderabad based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) found that the Indian scutigeromorphs originated in Gondwana and continued to evolve within Peninsular India. They also believe that Australian biodiversity of Scutigeromorpha is likely to have originated when the Indian ancestor dispersed from India within the last 100 million years.

They used specimens from across the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats as well as a global dataset of genetic sequences. The tremendous species richness of the peninsular region of India, particularly within the Western and Eastern Ghats mountain chains have intrigued the researchers. This is even more so as the Peninsular Indian landmass is extremely old. It was part of the supercontinent 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.

Where then, do all the organisms found in Peninsular India come from? This question bothered these scientists and took up the study on scutigeromorphs.

Dr Jahnavi Joshi’s lab at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad sought to answer this question using one group of animals, Scutigeromorpha. These are long-legged, fleet-footed centipedes often mistaken for spiders. Using specimens from across the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats as well as a global dataset of genetic sequences, they found that the 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 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 Dr Joshi, Senior Scientist at CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology.

Furthermore, the current Australian biodiversity of Scutigeromorpha is likely to have originated when the Indian ancestor 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 kilometers of land and ocean,” said Maya Manivannan, the first author of the paper.

“Perhaps, the scutigeromorphs took ‘a passage through India’ from Gondwana all the way to Australia,” she added. This paper was published in the Journal of Biogeography.