New Delhi: Horses like horses and rhinos evolved from exotic sheep-sized animals that looked like a cross between a pig and a dog and roamed in India about 55 million years ago, the researchers claim.
Experts from Johns Hopkins University, who discovered mines in Gujarat, found the remains of a strange animal called Cambatherium. Cambatherium is an extinct cousin of Perisodectiles (a group of mammals including horses, rhinos and tirpirs) that lived in the Indian subcontinent about 55 million years ago.
The first trip to Rajasthan in 2001 was a bit of a success, “however, we found only a few fish bones on that trip. The following year, our Indian ally Rajendra Rana continued to explore the lignite mines in the south and came to the Vastan mine in Gujarat,” said Joe Hopkins University Emeritus Professor and lead author of the study. This new mine proved more promising.
“In 2004, our team was able to return to the mine, where our Belgian colleague Thierry Smith discovered the first mammal fossils, including the Combatherium,” Rose said in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Encouraged, the team returned to the mines of Gujarat despite challenging conditions and collected fossil bones of the combatherium and many other vertebrates.
Cambatherium represents a phase of evolution more than any known periododactyl, which is a subsidiary of India or a group close to it – they were scattered across other continents when land connections were formed with Asia.
The researchers said the animal evolved at a time when India was still an island. The results also confirm the first proposed theory 30 years ago that the origin of horses can be traced back to India when moving north from Madagascar.
Rose said that in 1990, Krause and Massey proposed that while turning north from Madagascar, the command would have evolved in India, extending to the northern continent when India collided with Asia.
The latest findings are the culmination of 15 years of work by a global team of researchers and include more than 350 fossils found across India to bring together the entire skeletal anatomy of the Combatherium.
Despite the abundance of perisodactyls in the Northern Hemisphere, the Cambatherium suggests that the group grew in isolation near or near India during the Paleocene (-566-66 million years ago) before dispersing to other continents when land connections with Asia occurred.
Cambetherium, first described in 2005, is the most primitive member of the extinct group that branched just before the evolution of Perisodectiles.
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