Stay Curious

SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AND UNLOCK ONE MORE ARTICLE FOR FREE.

Sign Up

VIEW OUR Privacy Policy


Discover Magazine Logo

WANT MORE? KEEP READING FOR AS LOW AS $1.99!

Subscribe

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?

FIND MY SUBSCRIPTION
Advertisement

A Bridge to Madagascar

Discover how Madagascar's fauna evolution reveals insights into ancient land bridges and unique species like lemurs and tenrecs.

Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news

Sign Up

There are no chimps, lions, or antelopes on Madagascar. But there are lemurs, hedgehoglike tenrecs, and the five-foot-long feline-looking fossa, found nowhere else in the world. The island’s isolation accounts for its peculiar fauna, but the curious thing is that Madagascar has been 250 miles from Africa for 120 million years--before the ancestors of lemurs, tenrecs, and other Madagascar denizens had even evolved. So how did these mammals get to the island? The best explanation biologists have offered is that a few fearless animals floated over from East Africa on rafts of vegetation. But Robert McCall, a doctoral student in zoology at Oxford, is skeptical. Madagascar is almost like a snapshot of evolution, taken 30 or 40 million years ago, he says. If we had all these rafts then, why don’t we see any rafts in the last 20 million years?

McCall turned to geology, his second love, for an ...

Stay Curious

JoinOur List

Sign up for our weekly science updates

View our Privacy Policy

SubscribeTo The Magazine

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

Subscribe
Advertisement

0 Free Articles