Horses: India
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The Cambaytherium thewissi of Khambat, Gujarat
The Times of India, Dec 12 2015
Paul John World's horses have a common ancestor in Gujarat
Just 40 km from the industrial town of Ankleshwar in south Gujarat lies the vast, cavernous and abandoned Vastan lignite mine spread over 1,500 hectares towards the edge of Cambay basin, colloquially referred to as Khambat. It is here that a team of scientists extracted a treasure trove of over 200 teeth and bones of an animal which is the ancestor of all horse breeds, including the finest -Akhal-Teke, Appaloosa, Mushtang, and even the Arab ones. Christened Cambaytherium thewissi, the ancestor is a Khambati that lived 54.5 million years ago during the Eocene epoch of earth.
This was revealed by a nine-member team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University , HNB Garhwal University , Rowan University , Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology , Ghent University , Panjab University, and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
Come January 2016, Kenneth Rose of Johns Hopkins University and J S Rana of HNB Garhwal University will be back to dig for more clues on other mammals and rodents. Scientists say Cambaytherium thewissi existed in the period when India was still an island separated from Madagascar, and headed swiftly towards collision with Asia. It took palaeontologists and geologists 15 years to come across these clues, which also suggest that apart from modern-day horses, even tapirs and rhinoceros originated from the same animal.
“Modern horses, rhinos and tapirs also belong to a biological order called Perissodactyla -animals that had an uneven number of toes on their hind feet and a special digestive system,“ said J S Rana, Department of Geology , HNB Garhwal University .
“We had found Perissodactyla remains dating back 55 million years, but their earlier evolution had remained a mystery . Cambaytherium thewissi is believed to be that missing link,“ Rana added.
The hunt for the missing link between modern-day horses and the Perissodactyls had begun in 2001, when Rajendra Rana of HNB Garhwal University and Kenneth Rose of Johns Hopkins University started looking into active lignite mines in Rajasthan. But the intensive search in Rajasthan did not yield much results, with scientists landing on fossils of fish and other sea creatures instead. It was then that the team shifted their focus to the Vastan lignite mine at Mangrol, Gujarat.
“We first found some teeth of bats and other rodents.There were also fossils of primates, along with that of snakes and frogs. It was a few months later that our team found big bones and jaws of what we guessed as early Perissodactyls,“ said Rana.
