Papua New Guinea rainforests are among the most biodiverse on Earth. They still cover extensive areas but are being altered at a rapid rate. Their biodiversity is still largely unexplored especially in the treetops, called the canopy. For exploring the canopy biodiversity, new tools based on hot air or helium balloons are being developed. They allow collecting in situ plants and insects. Ants reign in the canopy. They are sometimes found living inside extraordinary epiphytes, which adapted their structure to accommodate the ants. For protecting native rainforests, an innovative approach, linking biodiversity research and capacity building, is implemented. Gifted naturalists, called parataxonomists and paraecologists, are recruited in villages and trained by internationally renowned scientists. Research stations create local employment. This source of income added to money from sponsors allow local communities to obtain access to a higher level of education and health care without having to give in to the pressure related to deforestation. (Author & director: Maurice Leponce, 2015, HD, 16min)
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For the past twenty years, an Indian-American-Belgian team carried out twelve seasons of collaborative fieldwork in search of vertebrates from the Cambay Formation in lignite mines of Gujarat, western India. Here is a summary of our main discoveries in the Vastan, Mangrol, and Tadkeshwar mines, including an updated overview of the whole vertebrate fauna. The fauna is around 54.5 million years old, representing tropical rainforest conditions in a coastal brackish palaeoenvironment. It includes the earliest modern mammals from the Indian subcontinent as well as endemic taxa. The most important result at the palaeobiogeographical level is the discovery of several vertebrate taxa of Gondwanan affinities, indicating that the early Eocene was a crucial period in India when Laurasian taxa with western European affinities co-existed with relict taxa from Gondwana before the actual collision of India and Eurasia. Terrestrial faunas could have dispersed to or from Europe when the Indian subcontinent came into contact, episodically, with different island blocks, such as the Kohistan-Ladakh island-arc system, along the northern margin of Neotethys Ocean.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025 OA
