Lectures and Talks

Today Madagascar has a rich and biodiverse fauna that is on the brink of extinction. We do know that a large ecosystem of megafauna including giant lemurs the size of gorillas, elephant birds 3 meters tall, dwarfed hippopotami, giant carnivores and horned crocodiles were driven to extinction a thousand years ago, but we have to rely on DNA to interpret their arrival times onto Madagascar. We know that the first humans arrived from Indonesia 2,500 years ago. The biggest mystery is how so many habitats and animals could have been destroyed in only 2000 years after the earliest humans arrived.

A recent clue comes form near the sapphire mines in central Madagascar where our Stony Brook team found fossils dated definitively at 10,000 years ago. In 2017 we published findings of toolmarks on the giant 10-foot-tall elephant bird bones and also hippos from the same ecosystem in the middle of Madagascar. Who were those humans that arrived 10,000 years ago, hunting the megafauna, and where were there origins? In 2016 our Stony Brook team discovered a remote rainforest in the center of Madagascar with new species as well as species from the four corners of Madagascar, implying that the island, now with 80 percent of the natural habitat destroyed, was once all forested. Then in November 2024, our Stony Brook team made a miraculous discovery within the most pristine area of Ranomafana National Park. A cranium mandible. Teeth and leg bones of the dwarf hippo were discovered in a cave inside the rainforest. Fossils rarely are found in rainforest, and this hippo, although not dated yet, is not fully fossilized. I will put all these recent discoveries into perspective to better understand the history of Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, and propose a way to save its rapidly disappearing fauna and flora into the future.