（外文电子版资料）Adams, Douglas - Last Chance to See.docVIP

Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine Last Chance to See ... For Alain le Garsmeur With special thanks to Sue Freestone and Lisa Glass for editing, research and being there CONTENTS Twig Technology Here Be Chickens Leopardskin Pillbox Hat Heartbeats in the Night Blind Panic Rare, or Medium Rare? Sifting Through the Embers Marks Last Word ... TWIG TECHNOLOGY This isnt at all what I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years. This was the idea of the Observer Colour Magazine, to throw us all in at the deep end. Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist, working at that time for the World Wildlife Fund, and his role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which L was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. All the aye-aye had to do was do what aye-ayes have been doing for millions of years - sit in a tree and hide. The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bats ears, a beavers teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder. Like virtually everything that lives on Madagascar, it does not exist anywhere else on earth. Its origins date back to a period in earths history when Madagascar was still part of mainland Africa (which itself had been part of the gigantic supercontinent of Gondwanaland), at which time the ancestors of the Madagascan lemurs were the dominant primate in all