Where Australia Collides with Asia The epic voyages of Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and the origin

Where Australia Collides with Asia

The uplift of the mountains in Papua New Guinea pushed remnants of the rainforests

of Gondwanaland into higher and wetter altitudes, preserving them and their related

plants and animals. The highland forests are a living museum because they provide

a home for Australian marsupials such as the possums, the cuscus, the bandicoots

and the echidnas, similar to the way they lived 20 million years ago. One marsupial

group has followed a unique evolutionary path, because it is in Papua New Guinea

that the tree kangaroo appears to have made the transition back to the arboreal life of

its possum-like ancestors. There are no longer any grasses on the forest floor, the most

succulent leaves are in the trees and even though they are still clumsy climbers they

make their way carefully through the treetops. Having already lost their prehensile

tails and opposable thumbs, the tree kangaroos have developed granulated soles on

their feet and powerful claws to help them grip branches while they feed on the leaves

and fruits of rainforest trees.

Papua New Guinea is the land of the birds of paradise. The plumes adorning the

male birds are there because it is the females who choose the most flamboyant of the

males to mate with and whose bright colours and array of ribbons, fans, streamers

and fur demonstrate how female choice can drive evolution. For the same reason the

men of the Highlands paint their bodies

and wear these same plumes to attract

females, and in their festivities they dance

and prance in a manner shared with the

birds of paradise.

Papua New Guinea is now the

main home of Australia’s rainforest

birds because here they have a better

evolutionary future compared to the

small and isolated pockets of rainforests

that remain in mainland Australia. The

relatives of the Papua New Guinean

birds of paradise living in the Australian

rainforests include the darkly iridescent

trumpet manucode, and the paradise

riflebird which, with a glittering turquoise

chest and crown, spreads his glistening

black wings like an oriental fan when

performing his courtship dance.

The commercial nutmeg is known to

only grow in the Banda Islands, yet there

are Australian native nutmegs (Myristica

insipida) growing in the Daintree rainforest

A group of Goodfellow tree kangaroos in Papua New
Guinea

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