one of the extraordinary things about
these flooded caves is that they
preserve lots and lots of species and
the quality of preservation is
extraordinary we have material there
that really represents entire individual
animals and a fauna so the amount of
information that we’re getting about the
animals themselves and the animals that
lived in that particular area I think is
unsurpassed
it’s probably the largest case of
subfossil lemurs that’s ever been
discovered Madagascar is the lost world
of the lemurs because that’s the only
place in the world where lemurs survive
today and the animals that are there now
give us insight into what the earliest
forms of primates were like and
particularly the earliest forms of
lemurs
given that we know areas close by have
produced fossils that are three or four
thousand years old our suspicion is that
we’re going to be working in that kind
of a time dragon from several hundreds
of years old to a few short thousands of
years later
we really would like to know how they
got in there because part of that will
help us understand whether or not we
have a biased or a normal sample of the
animals that were living there at that
time or indeed if the animals were
deposited in the cave at different times
we have several giant fossil lemurs in
this cave in another cave close by where
we’ve worked we have another giant
fossil lemur mega latias one of my
favorites had a skull that was about a
foot long but it probably wasn’t the
heaviest of all of these animals there’s
another animal called archeo in Juris
that we think was about as big as a
gorilla so we’re talking about a lemur
that was hundreds of pounds and weight
that’s pretty big
the very sad situation in Madagascar it
the the threat to species is tremendous
there’s a high rate of extinction it’s
it’s a very precarious situation and to
a significant degree we would like to
contribute some more knowledge about
that situation so that we can plan for
the future
we’d like to know what the interaction
was between people
climate change habitat change what
happened as those variables interacted
with one another that contributed to the
demise of the giant lemurs because
knowing that might give us some
perspective on what we have to prepare
for for the future
you
these flooded caves is that they
preserve lots and lots of species and
the quality of preservation is
extraordinary we have material there
that really represents entire individual
animals and a fauna so the amount of
information that we’re getting about the
animals themselves and the animals that
lived in that particular area I think is
unsurpassed
it’s probably the largest case of
subfossil lemurs that’s ever been
discovered Madagascar is the lost world
of the lemurs because that’s the only
place in the world where lemurs survive
today and the animals that are there now
give us insight into what the earliest
forms of primates were like and
particularly the earliest forms of
lemurs
given that we know areas close by have
produced fossils that are three or four
thousand years old our suspicion is that
we’re going to be working in that kind
of a time dragon from several hundreds
of years old to a few short thousands of
years later
we really would like to know how they
got in there because part of that will
help us understand whether or not we
have a biased or a normal sample of the
animals that were living there at that
time or indeed if the animals were
deposited in the cave at different times
we have several giant fossil lemurs in
this cave in another cave close by where
we’ve worked we have another giant
fossil lemur mega latias one of my
favorites had a skull that was about a
foot long but it probably wasn’t the
heaviest of all of these animals there’s
another animal called archeo in Juris
that we think was about as big as a
gorilla so we’re talking about a lemur
that was hundreds of pounds and weight
that’s pretty big
the very sad situation in Madagascar it
the the threat to species is tremendous
there’s a high rate of extinction it’s
it’s a very precarious situation and to
a significant degree we would like to
contribute some more knowledge about
that situation so that we can plan for
the future
we’d like to know what the interaction
was between people
climate change habitat change what
happened as those variables interacted
with one another that contributed to the
demise of the giant lemurs because
knowing that might give us some
perspective on what we have to prepare
for for the future
you
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