Lemurs, the Living Legacy

Very few of man's ancestors have survived unchanged down the long corridors of evolution. One that has is the lemur of Madagascar. Developing after the first primates, it is now classified as a prosimian - meaning ‘before monkey’ - and is one of the common ancestors of both monkey and men. The prosimians, small insect-eating animals that lived in trees and hunted by night, are known from fossil finds to have flourished from about 60 million to 40 million years ago. They gradually died out in most parts of the world and were replaced by monkeys and apes. In Madagascar, uniquely, they survived in the form of lemurs - thanks to a geological accident which separated the island from Africa at least 30 million years ago and so protected the lemurs from competition.