Madagascar Species No Longer Evolving At Breakneck Speed
Giant Leaf-Tailed Gecko This giant leaf-tailed gecko, one of the species studied in the paper, is displaying its bright red mouth to deter predators. Scary, kinda! Wikimedia Commons Have we reached peak lemur? Madagascar is home to an amazing diversity of animals; though it has only 1 percent of the world's land mass, 3 percent of the world's plant and animals species are found there, and many are like nothing else on the planet. But a new study finds that there might be a limit to how many species can call the island home, and that we may be at that point now. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, takes a look at seven groups of reptiles and amphibians, looking back through their evolutionary history to see just how the family tree branched out. Daniel Scantlebury, a Ph.D student and the author of the paper, was trying to...