We're going to focus mainly on Lemuria here, but it'd be foolish not to mention both of the so-called "missing continents" that people have theorized for years simply must have existed because—well, we're not entirely sure why. Either way, just like Atlantis, Lemuria was said to have been a giant landmass located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and in both cases one of the primary reasons for the creation of the theory of these lost continents was to explain how similar species could exist on two landmasses so far from one another.
In the case of Lemuria, it basically all comes down to a guy named Philip Sclater, who found himself puzzled as to why he was finding lemur fossils on the island of Madagascar and India, but not Africa or the Middle East. According to Sclater, the only possible explanation was that there simply must have been a giant landmass connecting the two nations, and he decided to name it after the glorious lemur itself. Over the years people have pretty much dismissed the notion that Lemuria ever existed, but the myth has continued thanks largely to some pretty batty writers, such as Helena Blavatsky, who wrote about the Occult, so you know she's a trustworthy source.
