From CNN, we get news that a previously unknown species of palm tree has been “discovered” on Madagascar! I put “discovered” in quotation marks because, as CNN says,

The palm tree, which grows to 66 feet in height and has about 16-foot leaves, is only found in an extremely remote region in the northwest of the country, some four days by road from the capital. Local villagers have known about it for years although none had seen it in flower until last year.

The bizarre flowering ritual was first spotted by Frenchman Xavier Metz, who runs a cashew plantation nearby. After seeing it he notified Kew Gardens.

Emphasis mine. Much like the famous coelacanth and the infamous giant squid, this palm was known by locals long before the scientific community took notice. I for one find such discoveries exhilarating: the idea that extremely large species can still be found long after the world has been more or less thoroughly mapped fills me with a bit of the wonder that early explorers and biologists must have felt.

This palm has a rather unique life cycle: it lives for a hundred years and then “bets it all” on a single energetic flowering that eventually kills it. With such a risky strategy it’s not surprising that this palm grows on the island of Madagascar, whose isolation has resulted in a number of unique and beautiful species.

With that said, I have to point out two of my favorites! Of course, the lemur is perhaps the most well-known:

Most people are familiar with the black-and-white ring-tailed lemur, so I posted instead a picture of the red-ruffed lemur.  (I took tons of pictures of lemurs, including babies, at the Amsterdam Zoo.)

My other favorite is the fossa:

Shown here in a very cat-like scratching position, the fossa loves to hunt lemurs.  Both pictures are from the Amsterdam Artis Zoo, courtesy me!  Every time I visit the fossa cage, I gently chide the ‘lemur-killer’ fossa; of course, like most ‘cats’, they couldn’t care less.

Both animals are nice illustrations of evolution in action.  Lemurs are of the order Primate, just like most monkeys, apes and us, but are of a different suborder: Strepsirrhini for the lemurs, Haplorrhini for us.  Similarly, the fossa is related to more familiar cats through the suborder Feliformia, but lie in a different family (Eupleridae) than the lions, tigers and housecats we’re familiar with (Felidae).  Both animals share common features with their distant cousins, but also are undeniably unique – the product of millions of years of adaptation to their isolated environment.

Finds such as the new species of palm suggests that we’ve still got lots of exciting biological discoveries still to come!