Preserved insects shed new light on India’s history

A VAST collection of bees, termites, spiders, flies and ants dating back 53 million years has challenged assumptions about India’s early history.

The bugs, preserved in lumps of amber, show that India was not cut off from the rest of the world before joining the Asian continent 50 million years ago.

When India was an island there must have been a flow of small creatures travelling between it and the mainland.

Scientists discovered more than 700 arthropods – animals with jointed legs like insects and spiders – in the amber collected from the coast of north-west India’s Gujarat province.

They were preserved in solidified sap chemically linked to a family of hardwood trees that now makes up 80% of the forest canopy in south-east Asia.

The creatures turned out to have relatives in northern Europe, Asia, Australia and Central America.

This was a surprise, since according to geological theory India had been an isolated land mass for about 100 million years – enough time for its own unique species to evolve.

“The insects trapped in the fossil resin cast a new light on the history of the sub-continent,” said Professor Jes Rust, from the University of Bonn in Germany.

The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

India is believed to have “broken off” from the East African land mass 160 million years ago.