Environment of Sri Lanka
Open-knowledge reference entry
The environment of Sri Lanka exhibits a remarkable biodiversity.
Sri Lanka is considered to be the richest country in Asia in terms of species concentration and is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots.
Physical geography
Sri Lanka was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, India and Antarctica. Gondwana began to break up 140 million years ago. The tectonic plate on which Sri Lanka was located, the Indian Plate, collided with the Eurasian Plate creating the Himalayas.
Sri Lanka was originally part of the Deccan land mass, contiguous with Madagascar. The Loris, found only in Sri Lanka and South India, is related to the Lemurs of Madagascar. The connection to India led to a commonality of species, e.g. freshwater fish, the now extinct Sri Lankan Gaur (Bibos sinhaleyus) and the Sri Lankan Lion (Panthera leo sinhaleyus).
The island was connected, off and on at least 17 times in the past 700,000 years, to India.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Environment of Sri Lanka” as open-knowledge reference entry. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5381078. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Environment of Sri Lanka” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.