How Madagascar drifted off alone — and grew a whole world of animals found nowhere else on Earth
Everything in this story really happened — it just happened very, very slowly, across hundreds of millions of years. Read it aloud together. The little yellow notes are for curious older kids and grown-ups who want the real science words.
Once upon a time, there was no island called Madagascar at all. Its rocks were packed into the middle of an enormous crowd of land, where nearly all the world's continents huddled together in one giant piece.
Africa held India's hand. And little Madagascar was squeezed right in between them, like a child in the middle of a family photo.
Then, ever so slowly — so slowly that a whole dinosaur could be born, grow old, and turn to stone before anything looked different — the ground began to crack.
Madagascar, still holding India's hand, started pulling away from Africa. Warm seawater came rushing into the gap between them, wider and wider, until there was an ocean where the crack had been.
For a long while Madagascar and India drifted together, like two friends sharing one small boat. But then the boat split in two!
India let go and hurried off toward the north — in such a rush that one day it would crash into Asia and crumple up the tallest mountains in the world. And Madagascar was left all by itself, a single island in the middle of a wide, wide ocean.
Here is a funny thing. Whoever happened to be standing on Madagascar when it floated away became its passengers forever.
And back in those days, that meant dinosaurs. A fierce, wrinkle-faced hunter stomped through the forests. A long-necked giant munched the treetops. And there was even a frog so enormous it might have snapped at baby dinosaurs for dinner!
Then one terrible day, a rock as big as a mountain fell out of the sky and struck the Earth. All over the world the dinosaurs disappeared — on Madagascar too.
The island grew very quiet. Suddenly there was lots and lots of empty space, and hardly anyone left to fill it. An empty island, waiting…
Now here is the strangest part of the whole story. Every so often, far away on the African coast, a storm would tear a tangle of trees and roots loose and wash it out to sea — a little floating raft, with a frightened animal clinging on top.
Most of those tiny sailors were lost to the waves. But once in a very, very long while, a raft drifted all the way across the ocean and bumped into Madagascar. And a small, blinking passenger stepped ashore into an empty land — with the whole island to itself.
One of those little travellers was a furry, big-eyed primate. Its great-great-great-(a-million-greats)-grandchildren became the lemurs. Other rafts carried the ancestors of the spiky tenrecs, the mice, and the catlike fossa.
With no one else around and a whole island to share, these lucky animals changed and changed and changed — over millions and millions of years — until they became living things you cannot find anywhere else in the whole world.
More than a hundred kinds of lemur, leaping through the trees. Chameleons in every colour, rolling their swivelly eyes. And fat, friendly baobab trees that look as though they were planted upside down, with their roots waving at the sky.
Madagascar even grew giants. The elephant bird stood taller than a grown-up and was heavier than an ox, laying eggs bigger than your head. And some lemurs grew as large as gorillas, climbing slowly through the trees.
Then, only a few thousand years ago — a blink in this long story — the very last new passengers arrived at last: people. And within a short time, sadly, the biggest of the giants were gone forever.
And today? Today Madagascar is still its own little world, floating quietly in the Indian Ocean. Nearly nine out of every ten wild things there — the lemurs, the chameleons, the baobabs, the catlike fossa — live nowhere else on all the Earth.
All of it, every leaping lemur and every upside-down tree, because long, long ago an island went sailing away… and kept its very own secret garden of life.
The End.
What the Earth was doing, and who was living on Madagascar, at each step. Read the blue side for the rocks and continents and the green side for the plants and animals.