There is a beautiful legend which speaks of the South Atlantis, the sunken continent of
Lemuria. There, there were dense ancient jungles inhabited by beings different from any others
ever known; unique creatures which arose in an independent world, isolated from the rest
of the continents.
It was a land of marvels and surprises.
The animals had followed their own evolutionary models, giving rise to prodigious beings.
Life had a second chance to experiment with prototypes, and the results were astonishing.
There, the reptiles still ruled over the land, the plants acquired surprising forms, and
in the thicket, hidden in the shadows of the jungle, lived strange men, silent, graceful
ghosts, relatives of our own species, which were given the generic name of lemurs, the
most emblematic inhabitants of Lemuria.
According to the legend, Lemuria, like Atlantis, sank. But isolated in the Indian Ocean, a
fragment of that fabulous continent remained; a solitary island where the animals would
jealously guard the secrets of their origins, a refuge for a wildlife that would later astonish
the world: Madagascar.
This is a sifaka, a member of an extraordinary, unique zoological group.
They are not monkeys, and nor are they related to dogs, they are not insectivores, and are
entirely unlike the squirrels. Nonetheless, they do share with us distant ancestors from
a time when the mammals fought for supremacy over the earth.
They are lemurs, pro-simians. The very name, a Roman word referring to spectres, gives
an idea of the mystery and legend they inspired among naturalists and zoologists from all
over the world, before they were able to define their taxonomy.
The legend of Lemuria is not as ancient as Plato’s Atlantis, and therefore it took
less time for the mystery to be resolved. Its creator, the zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater
suggested the story in 1874, and Wegener’s theory of continental drift once and for all
destroyed the legend of the southern continent. But despite the fact Lemuria was revealed
as simply a myth, the great doubts concerning its origin did not end with the theories of
Wegener. Because the strange independent beings of the island of Madagascar stubbornly refused
to conform to preconceived zoological models.
Sclater himself drew the attention of the scientific world to the peculiarities of the
creatures of Madagascar. There, the animals bore no similarities to those of the nearby
continent of Africa. There were no large pachyderms, antelopes, giraffes or lions; there were no
monkeys or felines, and yet there were great affinities between some of these creatures
and the most archaic animals of South America, India and the Malaysia-Australia region. Where
had these beings come from? What was the origin and the relationship of these children of
the legendary Lemuria?
While the species of the world competed in a no-holds-barred evolutionary race, Madagascar
developed at its own pace.
Here the hunters and their prey changed more slowly, away from the influences of new, much
more specialised species which natural selection was creating in the different continents.
And in Madagascar the distant world of the Triassic remained latent, producing a parallel
evolution which generated the island’s extraordinary zoology.
A collared iguana observes a cricket that has abandoned the safety of its tunnel.
Reptiles and invertebrates must have been the most common living beings in what is now
Madagascar when it became independent from the continental lands, as at that time the
earth was ruled over by the dinosaurs.
The legacy of those days remains alive here, on the island of Madagascar, where there are
over 300 known species of reptiles, of which almost 90% are endemic. The dinosaurs disappeared
as in the rest of the world, but the reptiles took over and lay claim to supremacy.
These little dragons which today divide between them the different habitats of Madagascar
indicate, however, that the children of Lemuria hold the secret of their origins. Because
many Madagascan reptiles are related not to the reptile families of Africa, but rather
to those that now inhabit the distant jungles of South-America, Indo-Malaysia and Australia.
And it is there, in the heart of the still surviving jungles of remote southern countries,
that our search for the origin of the strangest fauna on the planet begins.