Ooooh, finally something I know something about....

Both Zootecus insularis (and its many forms) and Pupoides coenopictus (and
its many forms) occur basically from Morocco, east across northern Africa,
the Middle East (s. l.) Iran, Pakistan, and northern (to south central)
drier portions of India.  Zootecus drops out in northwest India, but there
are a few scattered records to the east.  The interesting thing about P.
coenopictus is that it also occurs in the dry areas of central Burma, skips
the rest of SE Asia, and is then found again in dry areas of Java,
Indonesia and perhaps even further east.  Other Pupoides species occur in
arid Australia, at least in the west.  These distributions are probably
somewhere about Miocene in age (24 - 5 million years), based on the
climatic changes that took place after India collided with Asia.

This distribution is seen in other animals such as the Russell's viper (not
to Australia....only to Komodo and western Flores, Indonesia).  It
indicates formerly vast areas of arid habitats (grassy and scrubby savanna)
across SE Asia which have been swallowed up by the lowland dipterocarp
forests prevalent today.

And speaking of India....it's pretty enigmatic.  The true Gondwanan land
snails (i.e. Acavus) are only known from Sri Lanka and southern
India.  They appear not to have dispersed far or are now restricted to the
south.  It appears that India has received much more than it gave to the
region's land snail fauna.  This may be because of volcanic events that
killed off much of the peninsular fauna.  Or, we shouldn't forget that the
Himalayas are relatively young and their uplifting caused a great deal of
aridification in the region that surely impacted once long-standing
distributions.

Some mainland groups seem to have dispersed from the east, down the Eastern
Ghats and then over to the Western Ghats and north as far as south of
Bombay.  Other groups came across the Himalayan foothills from BOTH
directions......Buliminidae from the west and some cyclophorids from the
east....to mention but two.

Topic too big....

Kurtles

At 09:19 PM 1/22/04 +0200, you wrote:
>Just a note concerning the landsnails: large parts of India, especially the
>southern, drier parts are inhabitat by several species which do occur also
>in Iran, Iraq, several other Arabian countries and Africa! To give two
>examples: Zootecus insularis and Pupoides coenopictus. The latter is even a
>native species of Israel and Jordan too, where it occurs in the drier part
>of the Syrian Rift valley. They have probably to be considered as very old
>elements in the terrestrial fauna of these areas.
>Henk K. Mienis