A Naturalist's Paradise

Steven Goodman slipped through the looking glass in 1989 when he first set foot on Madagascar, a biological wonderland 250 miles off the eastern tip of Africa. In thatched-hut villages where some people had never seen a white foreigner before, he heard ghostly screams emanating from a nearby rain forest at night. Undaunted, Goodman entered stands of wet, green trees dense with tangled bushes and lianas. He discovered the cries came from an assortment of lemurs—primates with large eyes, foxlike faces, and bushy tails—that predate monkeys and the great apes and have long been extinct everywhere else in the world. Farther inland, he trekked through arid forests where giant jumping rats surfaced among baobabs—odd, upside-down trees with wide bases and pointed tops—as well as through a sandless desert landscape speckled with thorny armored bushes with thick, fleshy leaves that harbored hissing cockroaches.