It's a race against time to protect the incredibly unique group of mammals.
Below Madagascar, cave divers surface secrets of the past.The team built genetic family trees that show how all of these species are related and how long it took them to evolve from common ancestors. Then, the scientists were able to figure out how long it took this amount of biodiversity to evolve and come up with an estimate of how long it would take for evolution to “replace” all of the endangered mammals if they go extinct.
It would take roughly 3 million years to rebuild the diversity of land-dwelling mammals that have already gone extinct. The models suggest that if all of the currently endangered mammals go extinct, it would take 23 million years to rebuild that level of diversity. “It is much longer than what previous studies have found on other islands, such as New Zealand or the Caribbean,” said Luis Valente, a study co-author and biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands,. “It was already known that Madagascar was a hotspot of biodiversity, but this new research puts into context just how valuable this diversity is.
The team added that this is a tipping point for protecting Madagascar’s biodiversity and that we have about five years to advance conservation efforts on the island, which is hampered by“Madagascar’s biological crisis has nothing to do with biology. It has to do with socio-economics,”
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