Roughly 1,000 kilometers east of Madagascar lies the small tropical island of Mauritius. Seemingly adrift in the Indian Ocean, it’s home to the extinct Dodo, rolling fields of sugarcane and — according to new research — three tiny crystals that date back 2.5 to 3 billion years. Oddly, that’s billions of years older than the island itself, which scientists think formed nine million years ago from lava spewed by undersea volcanoes.

What explains such a discovery? Lewis Ashwal at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his colleagues think the crystals once belonged to a drowned landmass and were dragged up to the surface during the formation of Mauritius. In other words: They came from an ancient continent hidden deep beneath the Indian Ocean.

Related: Here's Whatthe Americas eastward, hooking them into Africa like three puzzle pieces.

This is how the western hemisphere of the Earth may have appeared 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic period. During this period continental drift, driven by the massive forces of plate tectonics, had just begun to break the supercontinent of Pangea into Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south. Walter Myers / Stocktrek/Getty Images

Scientists now know the c-shaped supercontinent consisted of two smaller continents that collided at the equator: Laurasia in the Northern Hemisphere, which encompassed North America, Greenland, Europe and much of Asia, and Gondwanaland in the Southern Hemisphere, which was composed of South America, Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica.

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Pangea clearly didn’t last. During