Madagascar - Africa's Galapagos

It’s the 10th of May 1836 and Charles Darwin is leaning on the wooden gunwale of his ship, The Beagle. He’s yet to start writing his Origin of the Species, but he’s already forming his theories about evolution. Locations like the Galápagos Islands were to have a huge impact on him, but as he looks upon the green, tree-lined coastline of Madagascar, he has no idea what he’s missing out on.

Darwin never did stop on Madagascar. The Beagle passed so close to its shoreline that it rose and fell on the swell rising on its reefs. From the cover of the dark jungle, freakish creatures would have watched as the fabled ship disappeared over the Indian ocean horizon. Would Charles Darwin have adjusted his conclusions on adaptation if he’d wandered these forests and witnessed the huge variety of bizarre creatures lurking within?

For a landmass that was joined to Africa for millennia, Madagascar has an intriguing lack of traditional predators. Here there are no cats at all. No large mammalian predators except for one strange carnivore known as the fossa. Despite its clearly feline manner, it’s not actually a cat. It is loosely related to mongooses and civets but remains a family all on its own – with bizarre mating rituals in addition. The fossa roams through the forests, looking for its prime prey, lemurs. They form 75% of its diet, and at the top of the menu is Madagascar’s largest lemur, the Indri. It may be the biggest today, but the Indri is tiny in comparison to the giant lemur called Archaeoindris, that weighed up to 180kilos and once inhabited these forests millions of years ago.