African lion, extinct Siwalik Elephant once roamed Bengal

The emeritus scientist explained that Gondwana land mass - the super continent that comprised most of the landmasses of today's southern hemisphere, including Australia, Madagascar, Antarctica, South America, Arabian Peninsula and Indian Sub-continent, bumped into the Eurasian landmass creating the African route for the animals to migrate and roam into these areas in search of food and water.

“The roaming area of the animals was much larger then and the animal corridors streched from one part of the globe to another.

From parts of Africa to today's Himalayas, which was then known as Siwalik Hills, the youngest east-west mountain chain of the Himalayas, these animals migrated between 25 to 26 million years ago,” Pal explained.

These animals inhabited Siwalik region, but pleistocene glaciations found around one to 1.5 lakh years ago, which covered the entire area from Sibera to the northern part of Kashmir under ice sheet, forced these animals to migrate downwards towards the eastern part of today's India due to cold wave coming from the north.

The eastern region, known commonly as the Rarh region of Bengal, was covered in dense forest and had a very suitable climatic and ecological condition for the inhabitation of these animals, Pal said.

The findings formed the subject matter of a book “Animal Remains from South Western part of West Bengal and their relevance to the Ancient Civilisation of the Area” published by the ZSI in January this year.

The book has been jointly written by Pal and another paleontologist Supriya Nandy.

The director of ZSI, K Venkatraman, said the institute would carry out more zoo-archaelogical expiditions in order to find out more details of the animals which once had a free run in this part of India.