Madagascar

Madagascar has been separated from Africa for some one hundred and sixty million years and from the Indian subcontinent for about eighty-eight, an isolation so prolonged that around ninety per cent of its fauna and flora exists nowhere else in the world. The island strings together rainforest on the eastern slope, deforested highlands in the centre, dry deciduous woodland and baobabs in the west, and in the south a surreal spiny forest of succulents adapted to extreme drought. The lemurs, which here fill the niches of primates, squirrels and even woodpeckers, have diversified into more than a hundred species. To them are added half the world's chameleons, tenrecs that recall hedgehogs and shrews without being either, and the fossa, the island's largest carnivore.