Schlagwort-Archiv: rarest mammals on Earth

Marojejy: Marojejy National Park is one of the most biodiverse and beautiful in Madagascar, but also one of the most difficult to travel to. An “advanced paradise”! The Malagasy words maro and jejy have various meanings, including “many stones” and “much rain”, but also “many animals” and “many ancestral spirits”. Location: Marojejy National Park is located in the northeast of …

Andasibe: Formerly, this national park and the village Andasibe had the french name Périnet, which derived from French Henri Périnet, who built the train station nearby at the beginning of the 20th century. Today it is a complex of national parks wearing the Malagasy name Andasibe-Mantadia. The Malagasy name Andasibe means as much as “big camp”, which points to the …

Lemurs are probably Madagascar’s most famous mammals – not for nothing because they originally exist only there and nowhere else in the world. They belong to the strepsirrhine primates and are divided into about 100 different species. The word lemures comes from Latin and refers to the spirits of the dead of ancient Rome, who have little resemblance to the …

Indeed it looks a little strange: The Fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox). The long-stretched body wears a thick tail of almost equal length, and the cat-like head is graced by quite sharp teeth and a big, round nose. And although the Fossa grows only knee-high, it is Madagascar’s largest predator. Both genders reach a maximum body weight of 12 kg, the males …

Originally, Madagascar has no big mammals like buffaloes, zebras, hippos, lions or other large animals you can meet all around Africa. Ruminants, which settle nearly all regions worldwide, lack in Madagascar completely. The now everywhere kept Zebus were introduced to the island as domestic cattle and don’t occur in the wild. The Indian Civet is another animal introduced by humans, …