- Gondwana
- name of a region in north central India, from Sanskrit gondavana, from vana "forest" + Gonda, Sanskrit name of a Dravidian people, said to mean literally "fleshy navel, outie belly-button." The name was extended by geologists to a series of sedimentary rocks found there (1873), then to identical rocks in other places. Because the fossils found in this series were used by geologists to reconstruct the map of the supercontinent which broke up into the modern southern continents of the globe about 180 million years ago, this was called Gondwanaland (1896), from German, where it was coined by German geologist Eduard Suess (1831-1914) in 1885.
