Madagascar

Madagascar broke away from Africa over a hundred million years ago and spent the time alone, growing its own separate world of lemurs and baobabs and creatures found nowhere else. So it surprises people to learn that the crocodile in its rivers is no Malagasy endemic at all. It is Crocodylus niloticus, the same Nile crocodile of the mainland, and it must be treated with the same seriousness here as on the Zambezi. Same animal. The island did once have a crocodile of its own, the horned Voay. That animal is gone, lost within the span of human history. What remains is the familiar animal on unfamiliar ground, woven into Malagasy life in ways found nowhere else.