Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
years, making them not only the earliest fossils ever to be found in Madagascar, but
also probably the oldest in the world.
Another unusual find was of a very strange blunt-snouted, herbivorous crocodile
in northwest Madagascar, dating from the late Cretaceous (97-65 million years ago).
Prior to the discovery of this beast (
Simosuchus clarki
) experts had believed ancient
crocodiles to resemble more closely those alive today.
In2001anewspecies ofdinosaurwasfoundandisthoughttobethefirstanimal to
take its name from a pop star. Palaeontologists named
Masiakasaurus knopfleri
after
the lead guitarist of Dire Straits because whenever they played his music they struck
lucky finding fossils!
M. knopfleri
was a ferocious little bipedal carnivore (the genus
name comes from the Malagasy for 'violent') whose larger cousin
Majungatholus
atopus
was discovered by the same team from the State University of New York,
Stony Brook. This lived around 70-65 million years ago and is believed to have been
cannibalistic. An examination of distinctive marks on the fossilised bones suggests
that they could only have been caused by the teeth of the same species, though it is
stillamatterofdebatewhetherthevictimwasaliveatthetime.(Cannibalismhasbeen
documented in only one other species of dinosaur.)
Until very recently, Madagascar had a flourishing megafauna (a word used to refer
toalllargeanimals).Whenhumansfirstsettledontheislandlessthan2,000yearsago,
they would have been greeted with great forests populated by huge tortoises, dwarf
hippos and lemurs the size of gorillas. Around 16 species of lemur are known to have
been bigger than the indri, the largest alive today, but all are now extinct as a result of
the arrival of man.
PerhapsthemostamazingofMadagascar'sextinctanimalsisstillfreshinMalagasy
folklore. Tales of this creature were passed along to Marco Polo who wrote extra-
vagantly of an awesome bird, the giant roc, capable of carrying off an elephant. This
majestic animal was, in fact, the flightless elephant bird or Aepyornis.
Standingover3mtall,itwouldhavemadeanostrichseemlikeagoose.Thelargest,
Aepyornis maximus
, weighed in at more than 500kg and is thought to have been the
largestbirdevertohavelived.Sadly,likethefamousdodoofneighbouringMauritius,
it was driven to extinction by humans in the last few centuries.
