Philip Sclater was an English zoologist and ornithologist. He served for many years as secretary of the Zoological Society of London and is known for proposing the division of the world into six “zoogeographic regions” based on the distribution of birds.
In 1864, to explain why lemur relatives are found in both Madagascar and India, he suggested that land linking the two once existed in the Indian Ocean and named it “Lemuria.” This was the beginning of Lemuria. Sclater proposed it as a scientific hypothesis; it was later told of in mystical thought as a “lost civilization.”
