And they found it through a few handfuls of sand.
The islands Reunion and Mauritius, both well-known tourist destinations off the southeastern coast of Africa, are hiding the micro-continent, a fragment known as Mauritia that detached while Madagascar and India drifted apart during the Precambrian era, scientists said.
It had been hidden under huge masses of lava. A group of geoscientists from Norway, South Africa, Britain and Germany published a study that suggests, based on the study of lava sand grains from the beach of Mauritius, the existence of further fragments.
The sand grains contain semi-precious zircons aged between 660 million and 1.9 billion years, which is explained by the fact that the zircons were carried by the lava as it pushed through subjacent continental crust of this age.
"We found zircons that we extracted from the beach sands, and these are something you typically find in a continental crust. They are very old in age,” Prof. Trond Torsvik, from the University of Oslo, Norway, told the BBC.
Three-quarters of a billion years ago, the surface of the Earth looked very different than it does today; the planet’s continents were joined in a vast supercontinent called Rodinia. And at the time, India nestled up against the island of Madagascar.