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Printer Friendly Print Madagascar`s lost wilderness @ the London `Catastrophes` conference

Madagascar`s lost wilderness @ the London `Catastrophes` conference

August 17, 2002

In the last 2000 years Madagascar has lost its entire endemic megafauna. This includes giant lemurs, pygmy hippos, elephant birds, and giant tortoises. This loss is the planet`s most recent prehistoric extinction event affecting a region with continental-scale diversity.

Ironically, the island is now a natural laboratory for testing the various competing hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the remarkable global pattern of extinctions in the wake of human expansion.




New research by Dr David Burney has revealed a rich record of evidence concerning human arrival, resource exploitation, fire occurrence, vegetation change, climate variability, biological invasion, extreme marine and geological events, and other ecological dynamics. Integrating these results at the landscape level has allowed explicit testing of models proposed for prehistoric environmental change and extinction by focusing on expectations concerning the ecological rates, patterns, and inferred processes that have been generated by competing hypotheses.

Geological Society of London, The



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