Though the living modern lemurs are only found in Madagascar and several surrounding islands, the biogeography of extinct lemurs extending from Pakistan to Malaysia inspired the name Lemuria, which was coined in 1864 by the geologist Philip Sclater in an article "The Mammals of Madagascar" in The Quarterly Journal of Science. Puzzled by the presence of fossil lemurs in both Madagascar and India, but neither in Africa nor the Middle East, Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India had once been part of a larger continent, which he named "Lemuria" for its lemurs.
Sclater's theory was hardly unusual for his time. The acceptance of Darwinism led scientists to seek to trace the diffusion of species from their points of evolutionary origin; prior to the acceptance of continental drift, biologists frequently postulated submerged land masses in order to account for populations of land-based species now separated by barriers of water. Similarly, geologists tried to account for striking resemblances of rock formations on different continents. The first systematic attempt was made by Melchior Neumayr in his book Erdgeschichte in 1887. Many hypothetical submerged land bridges and continents were proposed during the 19th century, in order to account for the present distribution of species.
As Lemuria gained some acceptance within the scientific community, it began to appear in the works of other scholars. Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian taxonomist, proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of "missing link" fossil records. According to another source, Haeckel put forward this thesis prior to Sclater (but without using the name 'Lemuria'). Locating the origins of the human species on this lost continent, he claimed the fossil record could not be found because it had sunk beneath the sea.
Other scientists hypothesized that Lemuria had extended across parts of the Pacific oceans, explaining distributions of species across Asia and the Americas.
The Lemuria theory disappeared completely from conventional scientific consideration after the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift were accepted by the larger scientific community. According to the theory of plate tectonics (which is nowadays the only accepted paradigm in geology), Madagascar and India were indeed once part of the same landmass (thus accounting for geological resemblances), but plate movement caused India to break away millions of years ago, and move to its present location. The original landmass broke apart - it did not sink beneath the sea level.
In 1999, drilling by the JOIDES Resolution research vessel in the Indian Ocean discovered evidence that a large island, the Kerguelen Plateau, was submerged about 20 million years ago by rising sea levels. Samples showed pollen and fragments of wood in 90 million-year-old sediment. This might lead one to expect similarity of dinosaur fossil evidence and will help to understand the breakup of the Indian and Australian land masses; it does not support the concept of Lemuria as a land bridge for mammals.
