Lost Continent

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 281, 28 November 1932, Page 7

Lost Continent

UNDER THE ARABIAN SEA SCIENTIFIC SEARCH PLANNED Telegraph—T’ress Association—Copyright CALCUTTA, Nov. 25. A search for the supposed submerged continent between the Indian and African coasts of the Arabian Sea will be undertaken next year by an expedition headed by Colonel Seymore Sewell, Director of the Zoological Survey of India. The expedition will also investigate the life of rar e marine animals supposed to exist in the Arabian Sea, and an attempt will be made to capture monsters believed to live i n midwater, never rising to the surface or sinking to th e bed of the ocean. The expedition will attempt to discover traces of continental areas supposed to have stretched westwards from India many thousands of years ago. The continent is known to scientists as “Lemuria. ” The theory of its existence is based on the presence of similar fauna on the Indian and African coasts of the Arabian Sea. The land of Lemuria is a hypothetical continent which is conjectured to have existed between Madagascar and the Malay Archipelago and connected these lands’. Th e study of the evolution of fauna and the comparison of fauna of distant regions have proved trustworthy instruments of prehistoric geographical research and enabled earlier geographical relationships to be traced, and the chronological order of the larger changes to be estimated. It is on the basis’of this evidence that the existence of Lemuria is conjectured. The island of Rodriguez in the Indian Ocean is regarded as a remnant of the hypothetical continent.