UC Berkeley

The paleogeographic history of the Indian subcontinent is unique among Earth’s landmasses. From being part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana for most of the Mesozoic, through a period of isolation as a drifting entity in the Late Cretaceous, to colliding with Asia near the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, the Indian subcontinent has been associated with, and dissociated from, a variety of landmasses. This paleogeographic history has been invoked to explain aspects of the subcontinent’s modern-day fauna, with a combination of endemic radiations, remnants from Gondwana, and more recent immigrants from Laurasia. Here, 2 network approaches document how vertebrate faunas of the Indian subcontinent, and specifically their relationships to those of other landmasses, changed during the subcontinent’s isolation from close faunal relationships with Madagascar and South America in the Late Cretaceous to a more Laurasian fauna most similar to those of Europe by the Eocene.