Sometime in about the mid 1980s, the phone rang. (Laughter.)This is my 1,000th comment on the Blue. It pleases me somehow to spend it on lemurs and Douglas Adams. Thanks, ChuraChura.
And the voice said, ¡°We want you to go to Madagascar. We want you to look for a very rare form of lemur, called the Aye-aye. The plane leaves in two weeks, we would like you to be on it.¡± Now I¡ªassuming they¡¯ve got the wrong number¡ªsaid ¡°yes!¡± before they could discover their mistake. (Laughter.) But in fact it turned out that they decided, ¡°Well, here is somebody who doesn¡¯t know anything about lemurs, anything about the Aye-aye, anything about Madagascar, let¡¯s send him.¡± (Laughter.) So I started to try and find out something about it, and it turns out it¡¯s very interesting.
Lemurs used to be the dominant primate in all the world. And they were very, very gentle, pleasant creatures. They were a little bit like sort of cat size, and they used to hang around in the trees having a nice time. And then, Gondwanaland split up. It always sounds like some sort of 70¡¯s rock group going their own way for reasons of musical differences. But as you probably remember Gondwanaland was that vast continental landmass that consisted of what then became South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australasia¡ªuh, no¡ªAustralia, Australia and not¡ªand this will turn out to be significant later¡ªnot New Zealand which turns out to be just a lot of gunk that came out from under the ocean. (Laughter.)
And as I say, lemurs were the dominant primate around the world, and when all these landmasses split up, and Madagascar was one of them, Madagascar kind of sailed off into the middle of what then suddenly became the Indian Ocean. And took with it a representative sample of the livestock of the period, which included a lot of lemurs. And they basically sort of sat there for millions and millions of years in glorious isolation. While, in the rest of the world, a new creature emerged. A new creature arrived that was much more intelligent than the lemurs¡ªaccording to it¡ª, (Laughter) much more competitive, much more aggressive, and incredibly interested in all of things you could do with twigs. (Laughter.)
« Older The accursed cat hath cometh | singular stylings Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by poffin boffin at 6:52 PM on November 6, 2014