Three days, three wild finds
The house-size boulder looked like a good landing site, at least viewed from the maps and satellite images Tim Laman and Conrad Hoskin found online. It was large and stood out in the boulder field that made up much of the terrain in the mountainous part of northern Australia for which they were bound. It was close to the rainforest they hoped to explore, a mountaintop remnant of what they believed must have been a much larger forest covering the region in wetter times. Earlier expeditions to the mountains’ base had uncovered new species, but the rough terrain had discouraged exploration of the mountains themselves. Laman, an associate of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Hoskin, a fellow at Australia’s James Cook University, suspected there might be more species new to science up top. So last March, they loaded their gear into a light bush chopper and made the two-hour flight to Queensland’s...