A 'lost world' in New Guinea

A recent Conservation International expedition to the Foja Mountains in New Guinea has discovered two new species of mammal. Mammals are perhaps the best-studied and best-documented group of animals; that new species are being discovered reveals how little we actually know about them in the wild. Check out photographs from the expedition.

Despite being called a 'lost world', New Guinea is under threat from human activity; its lowlands are being cleared for human agriculture and settlement but the mountain forests are still relatively intact for now because of their altitude and inaccessibility, but this might change as mining operations expand in its geologically rich interior. New Guinea's western half belongs to Indonesia and is one of its poorest provinces, while its eastern half to Papua New Guinea, one of the poorest countries in the region.

Preserving New Guinea is important: not only is it the world's second largest island after Greenland, it has the world's highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes, Puncak Jaya. Its size, elevation, and location in the tropics close to important biogeographic barriers like Wallace's Line make it ideal for the study of biological diversity and speciation. Indeed, Ernst Mayr wrote his pioneering contribution to the Neodarwinian Synthesis, Systematics and the Origin of Species, after his travels in New Guinea and studying its bird fauna in the 1930s. Its human diversity is also remarkable: Papuans speak (or spoke) the most languages (830) in the most language families of any country. Balancing human and environmental needs in a place with such cultural diversity will certainly be a difficult task and deserves more urgent attention.