Somewhat counter-intuitively, it’s been at least 130 million years since Africa and Madagascar last touched! Thanks to a series of stunning discoveries in northwestern Madagascar, we now have an excellent record of life on the island around 70 million years ago. The two landmasses formed a single big island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, after they split from Antarctica around 100 million years ago. Madagascar has been isolated for the past 88 million years for a good stretch of time before that, its only direct connection was to India. The lonely island of Madagascar – map by Addicted04, CC-BY. Today, fellow paleontologist Joe Sertich and I published a new addition to this fossil record–a “little” carnivorous dinosaur that predates the next youngest named dinosaurs of Madagascar by around 20 million years. Detailed analyses of modern organisms have certainly been important, but my personal interest is in what the fossil record can tell us. For decades, scientists have been working to understand how Madagascar’s unique fauna developed and changed over time. That makes it pretty tough for animals to get from point A to point B, and is why you don’t see lions Madagascar or lemurs in Mozambique. This unusual situation is a product of Madagascar’s isolation, because it is separated from eastern Africa by 250 miles of inhospitable saltwater.
Around 95 percent of the terrestrial animals on this island are endemic, meaning that they are found nowhere else on earth. When we think of Madagascar, its unique wildlife immediately springs to mind.
0 kommentar(er)
