lemuria
© Liz Leafloor: Public Domain/Deriv
The Lost Continent of Lemuria or Mu, (used interchangeably) has long lived under the shadow of its more well-known relation, Atlantis. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that for a brief moment in history, Lemuria gained a greater acceptance within the scientific and scholarly community. In fact, Lemuria was not originally an idea originating from the occult world, or from lost Ancient Egyptian sources as was Plato's Atlantis, but from the minds of leading scientific thinkers.

Lemurian Footprints Crossing the Pacific?

In the 19th century, just when Darwin's theory of evolution had achieved widespread acceptance, zoologists and evolutionary biologists observed a curious phenomenon: Across Madagascar, India, and the islands of the Pacific - lands separated by hundreds of miles of impassable oceans - lemurs were encountered.

In the late 1800s, Philip Sclater, an English zoologist and lawyer, was the first to make this observation, and proposed a theory that has since taken on a life of its own. Sclater, in concurrence with many other thinkers of the time, proposed that these landmasses, now separated by oceans, had once been a part of a larger continent in the Indian Ocean, submerged beneath the ocean. Sclater named this hypothetical missing continent 'Lemuria' after the lemur, and the name has stuck since then.