Of all the present-day lemurs none is as strange and mysterious as the aye-aye.
They form a separate family with a single species and their morphology and habits set them apart from all other pro-simians.
It is the largest nocturnal lemur and the last living examples hide in the different types of jungle of Madagascar.
It has a strange appearance, and its nocturnal habits have inspired superstitions among native Madagascans.
For some, they are the reincarnation of ancestral spirits and bring good luck,
but for many others they are an evil omen, and immediately kill them
an unjust punishment for the crime of simply being different from all the other creatures of the forest.
A long, fleshless middle finger helps it to extract the pulp from the canes
and the larvae from the trunks where it feeds.
No other lemur has such a tool and no other has teeth which continue to grow,
more like those of a rodent than a pro-simian.
Today, the aye-aye, probably the strangest mammal in the world, is in danger of extinction.
Like the rest of the lemurs and all the other animals of this independent world,
it is being deprived of the exclusive habitats that made it the way it is
determined its evolution and have kept it alive to this day.
And the reason is another mammal with which it shares distant ancestors,
those small beings of the jungles of Gondwana.
Its arrival brought cataclysmic changes. And dark shadows fell over the extraordinary children of Lemuria.
The action of man is devastating the wildlife of Madagascar.
In the first thousand years of human presence on the island two dozen species of large animals were destroyed,
including fifteen species of lemurs.
Creatures like the elephant bird, the largest that has ever lived on earth,
or a lemur the size of a gorilla disappeared for ever at the hands of those invaders who came from Asia.
Since the appearance of man in Madagascar, 80% of the original vegetation cover has disappeared.
And in just the second half of the twentieth century 50% of the jungles
that cover this country have been cut down.
And while its ecosystems are being razed and burnt,
Madagascar continues to astonish the scientific community, which each year discovers new species.
These bamboo lemurs, the smallest of all diurnal lemurs,
are an example of the critical situation of the exclusive animals of the island.
Their jungle habitat is being cut down to provide more crop land
because only in the jungle areas is there sufficient humidity to be able to plant rice.
As they remove the protective vegetation, men hunt them because in the diet of these impoverished,
needy people proteins are always welcome; and those that are not hunted are captured and sold as pets or,
even worse, are burnt to death when they set light to the impenetrable bamboo thickets.
In the indigenous legends of Madagascar,
men and lemurs are brothers separated by the vicissitudes of life.
One abandoned the jungle and became the master of the world.
The other remained and became a rarity, an ancient anachronism in a world of constant changes.
And today, Madagascar has again brought them together to jointly decide their future.
Madagascar is terribly fragile.
Its habitats are different from all others on the planet.
They are exclusive worlds with their own, parallel evolution;
delicate and irreplaceable places remote from the influences that shaped the world and the animals of the rest of the planet.
And man is now the decisive factor on which its future depends, the future of all its species.
This is a world of endemic species, the demonstration of diversity,
of the unlimited creative power of life.
Here, new forms remain hidden,
new evolutionary possibilities that would be unviable without the isolation
this island has enjoyed for many thousands of years.
And it also contains key pieces in the puzzle of the origin of our own species,
of the evolutionary steps which led us to becoming human beings.
Humanity anxiously looks to the infinite solitude of the universe dreaming of other inhabited worlds.
And, paradoxically, an entire world of fascinating,
unknown creatures is disappearing before our very eyes,
taking with it the secret of the origin of those mysterious children of the legendary Lemuria.