Word: faunas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Josh encounters the local fauna in "A Few Perfect Hours...
...snakes, birds, marsupials, bats - that lived anywhere up to 25 million years ago, when Riversleigh was a thriving rainforest in a cooler, wetter (and more southern) Australia. In so doing, the site has filled in what were once gaping holes in our understanding of the origins of modern Australian fauna. "Only in one or two places on the surface of our planet, in the course of the last three thousand million years, have conditions been just right to preserve anything like a representative sample of the species living at any particular time," naturalist Sir David Attenborough wrote in 1991. "Those...
...nice sideshow, but Archer and others are focused these days on something bigger. Reflecting on nearly three decades of Riversleigh exploration, "We were at first knocked out," he says, "by the simple, stunning biodiversity that we were finding." But in using Riversleigh to track the evolution of local fauna over millions of years, Archer began to grasp its predictive power. Riversleigh, he says, has changed ideas about which creatures should be seen as endangered. Here, the news is good, bad . . . and dire. The koala, for example, appears safer than conservationists had imagined. Its population and habitat have shrunk...
...Friendly Fauna As morning sun steals into the bar, Pickles, a gray wallaroo joey, wakes up on the pool table while her carer Nora Walsh, 18, does the accounts. Rescued after her mother was killed on the highway, Pickles now sleeps in a canvas tote bag instead of a furry pouch, drinks milk from a bottle as well as grazing on the well-watered lawn, and hops about the roadhouse as if it were native ground. What will happen when Pickles grows up the staff aren't sure, but at about 1 m and 20 kg, female gray wallaroos...
...November-to-April rainy season. But SNGF director Guy Rakotondranony insists they will survive - they have to. The seedlings are "our hope for the future," he says, "our ecological insurance policy." Isolated for eons in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar has evolved such a unique range of flora and fauna that 18th century French explorer Philippe de Commerson described the island as "the naturalist's promised land." Nature, he wrote, "seems to have retreated there into a private sanctuary where she could work on different models from any she used elsewhere." Today perhaps as little as 15% of Madagascar's original...