New Guinea & Melanesia

About New Guinea & Melanesia

New Guinea is the largest tropical island in the world and one of the least thoroughly explored biologically — new species are still described from it regularly, including large ones. It carries a mountain spine rising high enough to hold glaciers near the equator, and habitats stack from mangrove and lowland rainforest up through montane forest to alpine grassland. Its wildlife is Australasian rather than Asian: marsupials fill mammalian roles, including tree kangaroos that returned to the canopy, and there are no native monkeys or big cats. The island is the centre of diversity for birds-of-paradise, whose extraordinary plumage and displays evolved in the absence of the mammalian predators that would make such conspicuousness lethal elsewhere. Logging, mining and oil palm are the growing pressures.