200 million years ago, the lands of the southern super-continent Gondwana began to break apart.
This was the birth of the continents as we know them today.
At that time, vast jungles covered the lands of the southern hemisphere and the dinosaurs
were the undisputed masters of creation.
But there, deep in the dense Mesozoic vegetation, hidden among the shadows of a world ruled
over by giants, already breathed small creatures with hair, the first mammals; a lineage that
would eventually conquer the world.
The Australian night fills with living shadows in the prehistoric forests of the Atherton
plateau, in the north west of the country.
Small, shy creatures like this brush-tailed opossum must have been the precursors of all
present-day mammals.
In the jungles of Gondwana, the huge dinosaurs simply did not notice them. But their warm-blooded
bodies, their ability to keep their children inside them until they were completely developed,
and their astonishing adaptability were to be the keys which would enable mammals to
diversify and take over the world.
All that was needed were the changes that would allow them to demonstrate their evolutionary
potential. And those changes rapidly took place.
When Gondwana broke apart, the mammals were still scarce and primitive; a newly-arrived
group in a world which already for three thousand million years had nurtured forms of life.
In places that have since that time remained isolated, we can still today find clues as
to what those first mammals must have been like, and in Australia, the largest of all,
descendents of the most ancient group of all still survive.
This strange animal is one of the few remaining representatives of the monotremes, a group
of mammals so primitive that they still reproduce by laying eggs.
The isolation of Australia meant that these ancient animals were not forced to compete
against the more modern mammals which would develop in the still-connected continental
masses.
Today duckbill platypuses and echnids like this one – another Australian monotreme
which looks like a prehistoric hedgehog – have remained as testimony of the time when mammals
were just beginning their successful development.
Small insectivores, egg-laying monotremes and primitive marsupials which developed in the isolation of
Australia were also to be found in the prehistoric jungles of Gondwana. But fifty million years after the peculiar
mammals of Australia began their solitary life, the primitive insectivores began diversifying,
evolving towards the groups from which would emerge the lemurs, all the monkeys of the
world and even man: the primates.
And at this crucial point in the history of evolution, Madagascar began its existencein isolation.
The fragmentation of the continents would mean an unprecedented revolution in the history
of life on earth. Approximately 200 million years ago, the southern supercontinent broke
apart, creating Australia, the Antarctic, Africa, Asia and South America. 80 million
years later, Madagascar and India separated from Africa, then drifted for another 45 million
years before finally reaching their present positions. And on this strange wandering island,
evolution seemed to come to a standstill.